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109: Desmond Ng: Entrepreneurial Empowerment and the Austrian Approach to Value-Generating Organizational Design

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Austrian economics offers a wide range of knowledge and applications for better business performance. One of them is the design of high-value organizations

Download The Episode ResourceEntrepreneurial Empowerment – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Austrians understand the function of entrepreneurial businesses in the economy is to pursue and generate new economic value. That value is subjective, experienced by individuals as an improvement in their feelings of well-being. We also understand that subjective value applies not only to consumers but also to producers, including employees in firms whose purpose is value facilitation.

To fully realize the skills and talents of their employees in the pursuit of the organization’s visions and goals, entrepreneurial businesses look for the best ways to empower employees to utilize their Hayekian individual knowledge for the innovation and adaptation that leads to marketplace success.

Dr. Desmond Ng uses the term Entrepreneurial Empowerment to describe this approach to designing an organization that best unleashes the creativity of its entrepreneurial employees.

Austrian economics is particularly suited to addressing the organizational challenges faced by today’s entrepreneurial firms.

Businesses understand that they need to be more responsive to customers and the market. Firms are moving from a top down decision-making structure and searching for ways to move to a more decentralized firm structure. They are aiming to take advantage of all the different knowledge experiences that may be inside the firm, to be more adaptive to changing market environments and to acknowledge the importance of empowering employees.

Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek fully recognized the benefits of decentralization in adapting to changing market processes. Today, Austrians can apply that same understanding at the firm level, in the pursuit of unleashing the subjective experiences and individual knowledge of each employee to greatest economic effect.

The organizational design tool to achieve maximum decentralized value generation is Entrepreneurial Empowerment (EE)

A firm that organizes using Entrepreneurial Empowerment focuses at the leadership level on clearly defining the ends of the company (which can be packaged in the form of vision or mission or goals or objectives) and on ensuring that internal communications are strong enough and effective enough to ensure complete and fully distributed understanding and buy-in among the employee base.

The means for each individual to contribute to the achievement of these ends are left open to employees; they are not dictated or bound with managerial or administrative constraints. Leadership in an entrepreneurially empowered firm is non-interventionist, free of the strictures of central planning.

EE has two components: the first is structural empowerment (SE).

The structural empowerment element of EE refers to the communication structure that delivers employee empowerment. Se informs them about their opportunities for taking action and making decisions, and provides support for them to utilize their own knowledge in doing so.

Professor Ng used the example of design firm IDEO, which provides a fully-available repository of all the firms designs and ideas from all its engineers and teams, along with information about how past teams tackled the solutions to design problems, with what outcomes. Designers on today’s teams can utilize this shared knowledge, learn from the pooled experiences, and enjoy the freedom of embarking on new design paths by combining their own knowledge and skills with the corporate knowledge repository.

Structural empowerment also requires a policy to regard failure as an acceptable part of the innovation process, in order to foster greater risk-taking behavior among employees, and a greater willingness to experiment with new and unproven ideas. SE is a process that leaders and managers must actively and persistently support. The danger is that leaders may succumb to the temptations of power and control, and to seek to centralize their authority. This can be fatal to entrepreneurial empowerment and negate all its benefits.

The second core component is psychological empowerment (PE).

Employees perform best, innovate best and contribute the most creativity when they enjoy psychic rewards from their work. One important aspect of psychic reward is the search for and successful achievement of meaning and purpose. Research is clear that these high values are found in work when it is conducted in an environment that encourages their development. Professor Ng used Chick-Fil-A as an example where, because the company subscribes to a set of values, employees in what might appear to observers as the simplest and most repetitive service and production jobs can find meaning in their work. The result is unrivaled customer service ratings. Psychological empowerment comes from leadership conveying a set of principles.

Monetary incentives, rewards, and the awarding of titles can not match psychological empowerment in terms of effectiveness for motivating employees. The Austrian perspective delivers some quite revolutionary policies and approaches for organizational design.

Rethinking the concept of leadership.

In recent years, business schools have commanded a lot of attention by marketing and selling leadership studies, with products ranging from executive education to books and online courses. However, Austrian economics suggests skepticism about the underlying concept of leadership in business. Firstly, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment are the antitheses of business school style leadership — they suggest non-leadership, letting go of control, and abandoning hierarchy.

Secondly, as Professor Ng pointed out, the centralized authority suggested by business school style leadership tends to lead to the corruption of seizing power and control, clouding the ethical considerations that are at the heart of entrepreneurship, and undermining the trust of employees lower down the hierarchy. The results can be both a loss of legitimacy for the bosses and a loss of business performance for the firm.

The Austrian perspective on organizational design and management can lead us to a higher-performing firm, a more innovative firm, a firm that facilitates purpose and meaning for those individuals who work there, and trust and legitimacy for founders and executives.

Additional Resources

“Entrepreneurial Empowerment” (PDF): Download Here

Professor Ng’s Research Paper Entrepreneurial Empowerment: “You Are Only as Good as Your Employees” (PDF):- Download Here

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

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108. Per Bylund and Mark Packard: Radically Reshaping Business Thinking via Subjective Value

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In a recently published paper titled “Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship,” Professors Bylund and Packard apply the principle of subjective value to generate significant new avenues of thinking for entrepreneurial businesses to pursue.

Download The Episode Resource10 Radical Shifts in Business Thinking – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Re-think value.

Business schools teach value creation. But their definition of value is faulty, based on a profound misunderstanding. Value is not objective and measurable, as in the business school paradigm of generating more of it. Value is subjectively understood and experienced. It’s a motivation for action (people have a desire to achieve experiences that they value) but it’s immeasurable. It is emergent from complex social systems and patterns of interaction between individuals, not something “created” by businesses.

Re-think the economics of value and value creation.

Value is created by consumers via their experiences. Producers are servants to consumers and their preferences; producers seek to convince consumers to allow them to provide for their wants. Since consumers have alternative courses of action, producers must scrutinize and revise their plans continuously to conform with consumers’ changing choices. This is consumer sovereignty, an essential element of a value-centric business model.

Re-think the role of the consumer in the economic system.

Consumers facilitate their own consumption. They pursue their own individual well-being, including by expressing their wants and needs to producers. The demanding of solutions is the task of the consumer, as is the choosing between available and expected alternatives. They experience value uncertainty (their preferences may end up dissatisfied) and they actively assess and learn about entrepreneurially produced alternatives that are available. They learn cumulatively as they amass consumer experience. Thus the role of value innovation and solution discovery is, actually, the consumer’s and not the producer’s. Innovations are generated by consumers in their never-ending pursuit of higher-valued satisfactions. Consumers’ own imagination and understanding shape their subjective experience.

Re-think the role of the firm.

The producer’s role can be divided into value proposition creation, value facilitation and value capture. Producers respond to consumers’ dissatisfactions with the status quo by devising and assembling new value propositions – features and benefits responsive to consumer wants, aiming to generate feelings of well-being and satisfaction. Producers become partners in the consumer’s value learning process, providing a comparatively better offering than others, so that the consumer prefers it.

The consumer generates a willingness-to-pay, when they feel that the use value of an entrepreneurial offering exceeds the price they are asked to pay. The offering now has exchange value to the consumer. This money magnitude does not indicate the actual subjective value to the parties, but it does generate profit (if it covers production costs) that can be used in the market.

Re-think business models.

A business model captures the fundamental idea of consumers and innovative businesses jointly navigating a shared experience of value uncertainty, in a never-ending quest for higher value states from which they can both profit. This co-navigation process must be built in to business model design, and business model innovation consists of new co-navigation pathways and new ways of sharing. For example, the concept of generative business models we explored in E4B episode #104 gives a greater role in co-navigation to consumers as a way of generating new value.

Management without measurement.

Subjective value represents a challenge to theories of business that adopt a “make the numbers” approach to performance. When value is immeasurable, business processes must be assessed via variables such as the quality of understanding of the consumer and their preferences, the quality and accuracy of empathic diagnosis, and the trust generated with consumers to adopt the business as a co-navigator of value uncertainty. It is possible that survey data can be helpful. More fundamentally, Austrian economics can provide a set of principles for management without measurement.

One approach is qualitative models, which can be designed and subsequently calibrated with marketplace activity. One form of such models is simulation, using agents that represent the emotions and uncertainty felt by consumers in markets. This is a direction that technologically-augmented entrepreneurship may take.

Re-think output metrics.

Similarly, in a world of subjective value and qualitative assessment, concepts such as KPI’s (key performance indicators) can’t realistically be applied. Concepts such as profit and free cash flow continue to apply, given full recognition that they are reflections of accounting conventions, because they indicate the sustainability of the firm and its business model. But new output metrics for subjectively-experienced consumer value and for satisfaction and well-being remain to be invented.

Re-think organizational design.

Subjective value applies not only to consumer activities but equally to entrepreneurial activities. Professors Bylund and Packard present entrepreneurship as an individual journey, one that is primarily mental. The journey is a series of imaginations, judgments and learning over time regarding what problems to solve, what resources are available, what those resources can do, what can and should be done with them (in combination), how to do it and why (i.e. what are the goals and ends the prospective entrepreneur aims for).

Entrepreneurship is chosen. In an entrepreneurial business, many individuals are engaged in — choose — entrepreneurship. Much of their motivation lies in unleashing their imagination, processing their own learning, and finding purpose and meaning. Organizational design becomes the search for the best structures to free the individual to make entrepreneurial choices, to apply their individual imagination and explore the co-navigation of uncertainty with consumers. The firms that do this best will be the ones that succeed in value facilitation and value capture.

Re-think motivation and incentives.

Why do individuals choose entrepreneurship? As Professors Bylund and Packard point out, money magnitudes do not express much of entrepreneurial motivation. Subjective values of purpose, meaning, achievement, personal fulfillment and others are primary. These can not be captured in salaries, bonuses, awards, promotions and titles. The firms that master subjectivist motivations will be able to attract the best talent.

Re-think the social contribution of business.

Entrepreneurial capitalism is under fire in America today. Profit is seen as exploitative, and employment is often viewed as restrictive and oppressive. The ends of business are sometimes portrayed as conflicting with those of society.

An understanding of subjective value would generate a perspective of business as the facilitator of satisfaction and well-being in society. Business creates jobs and incomes for consumers, enabling them to facilitate their own value both in the form of psychic reward in their work and user satisfaction in their consumption value experiences. Individuals, families and communities are all beneficiaries of this value generation.

Businesses provide consumers with continuously improved goods and services at ever-lower costs, providing the means for consumers to achieve their desired experiences and satisfactions. This provision of means is generated entirely in response to consumers’ expressed wants and preferences.

Contribution to societal well-being is therefore the sole end of entrepreneurial business.

Additional Resources

10 Radical Shifts in Business Thinking (PDF): Download Here

“Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship” by Mark Packard and Per Bylund (PDF): Download Here

“The Value Generation Business Model” (video): Watch Here

Corresponding PowerPoint (Download Here) and Keynote Slides (Download Here)

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify

“Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship” by Mark Packard and Per Bylund (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_108_Article

“The Value Generation Business Model” (video): Mises.org/E4B_108_Video

Corresponding PowerPoint (Mises.org/E4B_108_PPT) and Keynote Slides (Mises.org/E4B_108_Key)

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): Mises.org/E4B_108_ABM

107. Ivan Jankovic: The Special Understanding of Entrepreneurship by Americans of the Austrian School

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Austrian economics has always been on the leading edge of innovative thinking applicable to business. Back in the last century, there was a group of American economists of the Austrian school who greatly advanced theories related to subjectivism; that is, the role of human beliefs and preferences, and of the market as a process. Here are some of the insights they gave us about entrepreneurial business.

Download The Episode ResourceEntrepreneurship Drives Markets, Innovation, and Value Generation – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

The function of entrepreneurship is the generation of new subjectively perceived value.

These economists got the name The Psychological School, because they understood that value is a function of human feelings, preferences and beliefs. The secrets to the successful pursuit of new value are not found in data and mathematics, but in human motivation.

The activity of entrepreneurs is the development and implementation of value-generation business models.

The twentieth-century economists we talk about on the podcast this week would probably never use the term business model. But their concept of the market as a process governed by subjectivism would embrace this modern term. A business model is a recipe for identifying value potential — an analytical outcome of understanding customer preferences — assembling a value proposition — a creative act of the entrepreneur — and enabling the customer to experience value, some of which can be captured by the entrepreneur via exchange if the business model is well-constructed.

Who are entrepreneurs?

Historically, some economists have debated whether entrepreneurs play the role of managers of the assets and activities of firms, or the role of owners establishing the asset base and purpose of the firm, or the role of capitalists providing the enabling financial capital. From the subjectivist point of view, it’s not a difficult question. Entrepreneurs are those engaged in the business of pursuing and generating new value. They might play one or more roles (manager, owner, capitalist) at different times in the pursuit.

Those in business firms who do not have an entrepreneurial role are the bureaucrats engaged in governance actions with no customer value, imposed by external influencers, usually government.

How do entrepreneurs generate value?

These economists understood the market as a process of individuals interacting to exchange. Therefore, they were able to establish that entrepreneurial value generation is a process and that it can be systematized (which is the essence of our Economics For Business project). A process has a beginning — in this case the identification of value potential, which requires a deep understanding of subjective value) and an end — the facilitation of value to the point where the customer can easily exchange for it, activate it, and experience it. It’s not necessarily linear, rather it’s recursive and dynamic, a continuous creative flow of knowledge gathering and learning and responding via innovation.

How are entrepreneurs compensated?

These economists realized that it represents a poor reflection of real life to identify the compensation of entrepreneurs solely with profit. On the monetary axis, they can just as well be paid in wages or dividends or other forms of monetary compensation. On the non-monetary axis, these subjectivists fully understood the concept of psychic profit: that entrepreneurs can do what they do for their own individually-perceived motivations, including achievement, fulfillment, the reward of serving others, and the purpose and meaning found via the entrepreneurial journey.

 

Additional Resources

Entrepreneurship Drives Markets, Innovation, and Value Generation (PDF): Download Here

Professor Jankovic’s Book, Mengerian Microeconomics: The Forgotten Anglo-American Contribution to the Austrian School – Buy on Amazon

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

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106. Mauricio Miller: Entrepreneurship as the Path Upwards From Anywhere, for Anyone

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Entrepreneurship is the best pathway for all people out of unsatisfactory economic circumstances.

Mauricio Miller, who arrived in the US as a poor immigrant from Mexico, and who also experienced living in some of America’s worst neighborhoods, spent over 20 years running social services for people growing up and living like he did. His conclusion: social services are the worst policy for such people. It is entrepreneurship that will open up the pathway out of the neighborhoods and out of the traps of low income and limited prospects. Entrepreneurship lifts up individuals, families, and communities.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Job creation programs are not the answer. In the US, people can get jobs, but they are often on a dead-end track that doesn’t generate learning or leverage-able experience — waiter, assistant, security guard, etc. Outside the US, even these jobs might not be available. Often, people with these jobs are entrepreneurs “on the side”, exchanging in the informal economy. This is just another indicator how important entrepreneurship is to upgrading people in low-income situations.

Entrepreneurship is inherent in people.

Is entrepreneurship hard? Is it too daunting for some? Does it require skills that only special people possess? Absolutely not. People have the capacity, the capability and the creativity. They are typically smart and determined. The requirement is simply to let that come out — to remove the constraints. Entrepreneurship is already inherently there.

Furthermore, people are motivated for entrepreneurship. Everyone has a particular talent, or at least their own interests, and they always perform better when they’re working on what interests them. And people want to run their own life, and make their own decisions.

Release the constraints.

The constraints that face them trace to being stereotyped and labeled, and these are barriers to credibility. Reduced credibility makes it hard to institute relationships, establish partnerships, to get loan financing, and generally to build the network support and capital required to advance their businesses. Mauricio says that if we don’t label them, and simply let talent and commitment shine through, all kinds of people can demonstrate entrepreneurial potential and achievement.

Entrepreneurial achievement and success will emerge when people are unconstrained.

How does the entrepreneurial movement get started? Naturally, and without intervention. In any community, there will be one or more individuals who become “leading lights” in the sense of trying something unusual or unprecedented, and succeeding. The definition in sociology and innovation diffusion theory is “positive deviants” — those who deviate from the norm or from history with a successful outcome. Leading lights is a better term.

The leading lights are followed by early adopters, who see a strategy that is successful and copy it or follow it. Then comes community support, which Mauricio characterizes as mutuality — everyone in the community eager to help anyone who can demonstrate success.

In his book The Alternative, Mauricio tells the story of Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian immigrant to the Los Angeles area of California who got a job at Winchell’s donut chain. He quickly absorbed the techniques of donut making and decided to open his own shop. Members of the community pooled savings to provide equity capital to buy equipment. The single store became successful and Ted opened more. The mutuality of the neighborhood was activated and neighbors became delivery drivers and ingredient wholesalers and came together as a supply chain and value creation network.

The word spread across California and Cambodian immigrants in San Francisco and elsewhere started reproducing Ngoy’s strategy. In a more general sense, the learning is: people, whoever they are, can start and run a business and make some money and become independent.

A new mindset: No plan, no policy, no structure, no institutionalization.

Mauricio’s key insight is that any intervention by government or charities or social services that aims to provide a plan or a process or a structure or to configure institutionalized support is not only not needed, it is destructive. It distorts and undermines the natural human motivations and drives that people draw on in entrepreneurship. The opposite approach — or no approach — is the best. Honor the natural preference of communities for self-help and sharing — mutuality as Mauricio has named it — and let them discover the pathways for themselves, find the knowledge, pool the savings, get access to the technology, use their network to connect to the needed skills.

Entrepreneurship is catching.

Once the bright lights shine, once the positive deviants emerge, once the early adopters find follow-on success, once the natural mutuality builds the supply chain and the support network, no intervention or encouragement or policy is required. Stand back and admire.

Additional Resources

The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong by Mauricio Miller: Buy it on Amazon

Family Independence Initiative: FII.org

Community Independence Initiative: CIIAlternative.org

Mutuality Platform: Click Here

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

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105. Per Bylund: Austrian Economics is the Science of Business Success

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For any size and any type of business, the generation of value requires more than strategy, planning, and executional excellence.

It calls for the establishment, communication, and internalization of value-generation principles, solidly founded and consistently applied. This concept of the long-term, dynamic application of unchanging principles is the essence of the Austrian approach to business.

Download The Episode ResourceLong Term Value Generation As A Science Of Business Success – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

In a podcast conversation, Professor Per Bylund reviewed and critiqued the popular business book The Science Of Success, and focused on these principles or guidelines.

A Vision For Long Term Value

Vision in this context is not the transcendental futurism of a CEO-with-superpowers often envisaged in business school texts. This is Austrian vision: a deep understanding of what constitutes value and how to act to realize value over time, rejecting short-term opportunism.

Value, of course, is subjective, determined by consumers, and so businesses that generate long term value can be seen as creating value for society, a laudable ethical contribution to social well-being.

Virtue and Talents

It’s unusual to encounter the word virtue in a discussion of business. In this context, it applies to the selection and hiring of a team that will collaborate on the long term creative task. This requires dynamically melding people with the right values, skills and capabilities, and the capacity to develop skills and capabilities even further. Hiring becomes one of the most important and most value-generating business functions.

Knowledge Processes

Entrepreneurial value creation is a knowledge-based and knowledge-intensive process. Knowledge is actively pursued, curated, combined, and processed. Knowledge advantages may be available, where firms are able to craft uniquely superior processes, methods and technologies. Crucially, these are never permanent. They can always be competed away, and rendered redundant by changing markets and evolving consumer preferences, although some forms of knowledge advantage, such as brands and culture, can be more long-lasting. Knowledge processes must include not only knowledge management but also the creation of new knowledge.

Decision Rights

Business books often talk about organizational design, but less often about the details of the processes of decision making. Whether the organization is hierarchical or flat and networked, it must still be able to make decisions and have them accepted and supported and implemented. Putting people in the right roles with the right degree of authority and accountability is the business challenge. This is different from the mythical business school idea of “leadership”; it’s a more a matter of productive collaboration among multiple individuals and teams, all of whom have some authority. The concept of decision rights breaks the ties and the logjams and enables corporate dynamism.

Incentives

The idea that behavior is responsive to incentives is core to the science of economics, of course. The same is true in business, and it’s important to use economic reasoning to get incentives right and avoid adverse incentives. The proposition given in the Science Of Success is that people are rewarded according to the value they create. Thus, we come full circle, back to the vision of value that constitutes the first of these 5 principles. If a business is clear on its definition and understanding of value, then it can be successful in incentivizing its people to generate that value.

Additional Resources

Long Term Value Generation As A Science Of Business Success (PDF): Download Here

QJAE Special Double Edition on Entrepreneurship (PDF): Download Here

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

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104. Professor Mohammad Keyhani on Generativity, The New Digital Pathway to Business Growth

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Our metric for business is value generation. The scope of Economics For Business is not determined by business size or type — we don’t label firms as small, medium or large, or by the stage of their development, or by industry.

Download The Episode ResourceHow Generative Is Your Business? – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

We see business through the lens of entrepreneurship, defined as the intentional pursuit of new economic value. A reasonable proxy metric we can use is growth. Business growth is consequence of generating new economic value. That value is determined by customers, and a growing company is creating more customers and/or adding to its share of customer dollars spent in value exchange.

The changing dimensions of business growth.

The economic route to growth is changing. In today’s markets, we often see speed of growth that goes beyond historical expectations. Business models can expand their reach and accelerate their performance over networks faster than ever before.

An Austrian perspective on business enables entrepreneurs to perform in a high-growth environment: Austrian entrepreneurs recognize the boundaryless-ness of markets, the flexibility of capital combinations, and re-combinations to respond to the rolling flow of value learning signals from consumers, and the benefits of shedding control in order to accept complexity and emergence. Austrian entrepreneurs are well-placed to enjoy success in today’s markets.

Professor Mohammad Keyhani sums up the Austrian entrepreneur’s advantage in the term Generativity.

The generativity of a system is the capacity to produce unprompted, unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from a large, broad, and varied audience. The concept of generativity is closely aligned with the Austrian ideas of spontaneous order and emergence.

By way of an example, the concept has been applied to technologies, where the characteristics of generativity can be identified as the increase in participation as an input and the increase of innovation as an output. One of the results of this thinking has been open innovation: anyone can participate (e.g., when corporate research is not limited to a corporate R&D lab, ideas can come from anywhere outside the corporation), and more and better innovation is an outcome.

One of the potential effects of generativity is to overcome knowledge constraints. Open innovation is an example: even the biggest corporation with the best minds in its employment can not possibly have a majority of good ideas. They don’t even know what answers they should be looking for.

Detaching the search process from the searcher.

When we face knowledge constraints, we search for answers. But a searcher only knows to search in certain places. Generativity can separate the search from the searcher, unleashing the search process to look in places that would be blind spots for the searcher. Similarly, generative design can generate product ideas that the human designer could not.

The incentives of the market can take control of the search process. The demand side (via broad, unfiltered participation) defines the problem to be solved and the supply side (via equally broad and equally unfiltered participation) creates solutions.

Generative characteristics can be built-in to a product or service.

5 characteristics of generativity in products are:

Leverage: the product can be put to many uses, and users can do many things with it, including those that the product designer could never anticipate.

Adaptability: the product can be further modified to broaden its range of tasks even further; new code can be contributed by users, accessories can be added, and so on.

Ease Of Mastery: there are no or low barriers to broad usage and broad adoption due to unusual or hard-to-acquire skills.

Accessibility: the product is accessible to everyone and its usage is not limited to a specific set of users.

Transferability: The advances in and changes to the technology made by some users are transferable to all users; new users can build on what previous users have contributed.

Generative products are tools for entrepreneurs.

Generative products are a little hard to describe or categorize. They’re more like toolkits rather than specific use products. Professor Keyhani started a website to curate some of these kinds of tools / toolkits for entrepreneurs: Entrepreneur-Tools.Zeef.com/Keyhanimo

Some examples he mentions:

Zapier.com and Integromat.com link web apps and digital tools together via API’s to assemble automated workflows.

Airtable.com — flexible and powerful cloud-based relational database for regular users.

No-code software development tools like Adalo.com (build your own app), Voiceflow.com (build your own voice app) and Bubble.io (anyone can be a software developer).

There is a broad future growth path in generativity.

Let users generate innovations; let them accumulate (new users can build on the innovations of earlier users); focus on capturing as much of the value as is appropriate for the entrepreneur-as-orchestrator.

Additional Resources

Professor Keyhani’s website: MohammadKeyhani.com

How Generative Is Your Business? (PDF): Download Here

“A Theory of Digital Firm-Designed Markets: Defying Knowledge Constraints with Crowds and Marketplaces” by Mohammad Keyhani, et al  (PDF): Download Here

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

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