Design your business model based on abundance

I can think of no better, optimistic, uplifting book than “Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance”. It has everything. Science, future, entrepreneurship, innovation, mindset, sustainability, leadership. It is my book for 2018. It will cheer you up no end.

Abundance

I have never dreamed about a book. Until “Moonshots”. The question that kept coming through was; what if we had an abundance of energy, food, water, land, computing power, minerals, clean air, etc.?

Pessimistic

The book is a wake-up call. I am a member of Abundance360 (highly recommended) and the Singularity University, but I have found myself increasingly pessimistic (and I am an optimist by nature) in my lectures and talks. I am reading too much pessimistic news about climate change and sustainability. It was wrecking my head.

Sustainability and scarcity

Because sustainability is actually not sustainable, the principles of a scarcity economy cannot work on a planet of soon 9 billion people. We have to create more of what we need rather than consume less of what we have. Sustainability is a synonym for the conservation of scarce resources, and you cannot achieve sustainability with conservation alone.

Natural capital cost as part of your business model

For the record, that does not mean we should make our business models sustainability and apply the natural capital cost to your cost pricing. There is no escaping carbon tax and polluter pays principles. Watch how regulation and consumerism will drive this to a tipping point within five years.

Entrepreneurs needed

SDGs express a beautiful vision, but they offer no blueprint for achieving any of them. Moreover, they do nothing to address the underlying causes of the 17 critical challenges they identify. It is not governments, corporations, or private individuals who will solve the sustainability crisis. Only creative, resourceful entrepreneurs who dare to dream big, audacious dreams can do it.

Forget current economics

We have to create more of what we need rather than consume less of what we have. To do that, we are going to have to adopt a fundamentally and radically different way of thinking. Forget current economists. They are constrained by linear thinking, and that linear thinking is applied strictly in the context of scarce resources.

Scarcity mindset as a scourge

A mindset of scarcity is the true scourge of the world. It is also big business. Artificial scarcity is created in order to restrict supplies and drive up prices. To the mind set on scarcity, everything is a zero-sum game (become a Zeronauts)

We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. Just look at our progress over the last 100 years: we’ve seen a doubling of the average human lifespan and a tripling of average per capita income. Infant mortality has plummeted. We’ve seen massive cuts in the cost of food, electricity, transportation, and communications. What’s more, according to the Flynn effect, we’re all getting smarter, too—at a rate of three points per decade. Scarcity, though it produces anxiety about the future, is paradoxically an artefact of the past.

A world of abundance

It needed Machiel Tiddens of Albert Heijn to shake and wake me up. Imagine a world of abundance. Virtually every resource we need to run this world is either in abundance now, or soon will be. However, the one thing we cannot renew, extend, or expand is time. The only thing that you cannot abundancise (new word) is time. That is always limited. The question is how we spend that time and with what mindset. Most of us are approaching the future with the wrong perspective.

Adjust the lens

Which means you need to adjust the lens. My next version of the strategic box has abundance as one of the frames. As humans, we are the top of the food chain now, and yet, as animals remain attuned almost exclusively to the bad news. That is our brain doing its job. Our human minds are also designed to think linearly, not exponential.

Dream

We need to fundamentally change the software of our mental and instinctual programming from one based on threat and survival to one of promise and prosperity. We need to dream big dreams, the really big dreams. The kinds of dreams that show that mankind can reach for, and actually touch the stars. Empowered by exponential technologies and entrepreneurial creativity, we should begin to see that there’s really nothing we cannot achieve.

Exponential

In 1825 it was believed that the human body would not withstand travel at the extraordinary speed of 30 miles per hour, a pace faster than a galloping horse. Since then:

1. Now we are witnessing the advent of quantum computing, which will amplify Moore’s law by a serious factor.
2. We are seeing the development of the brain-computer interface
3. In physics, we’ve finally realised the long-sought metallic hydrogen, a “Holy Grail” room-temperature superconductor that will also enable deep space launches with a single-stage rocket.
4. In 2010 it was estimated that a lunar mission would cost a billion dollars, it now costs under $10M (and decreasing).
5. Once we go to space, we can harvest Helium -3. Helium-3 is the feedstock for nuclear fusion, a clean form of energy production that can supply the world’s energy needs for millennia. In 15 years we will have a fusion reactor.
6. The global market for gold, iron, copper, and a dozen or so other metals is on the order of $600 billion, yet just one near-Earth asteroid is believed to contain more platinum than has ever been mined in the history of the world.
7. In our lifetime, people will be living on the moon, Mars, Europa, Titan, and possibly beyond.
8. There are companies aiming to make illness “optional” through the tuning of the gut microbiome, the forgotten but newly rediscovered seat of both health and disease,
9. There are companies that seek to solve the world’s energy problems by mining the astounding wealth of resources that presently lie untapped in our own backyard, the moon.
10. We are grafting “smart skin,” we are growing muscle tissues in bioreactors, and we are now capable of re-inserting entire chains of foreign DNA into our own.
11. Neuroscientists have already managed to graft human brain cells, lab-grown “brain organoids” sourced from human skin stem cells into the brains of mice.
12. Senescence is a hot research space. The discovery of a new class of drugs called senolytics has demonstrated a remarkable potential to reverse the effects of ageing by clearing out zombie cells.
13. We can already see machine intelligence approximating that of humans in many respects.
14. With CRISPR and Zinc Fingers gene-editing tools, it is now possible to modify, delete, insert, activate, or inactivate any gene—and do so with great precision
15. These technologies will make us better, faster, stronger, and smarter will also be decidedly organic, as we’ll also be able to replace and enhance (via 3D printing, CRISPR, and other biotechnologies) diseased, damaged, or tired organs—a development that may have many marketers rethinking the concept of the lifetime guarantee.
16. Today we can perform genetic sequencing in one location, electronically transfer the resulting genome data to another location, synthesise that DNA in the new location, and voilà, we have effectively wirelessly teleported bacteria from one place to another.
17. As biology is becoming the new digital (in many respects biology is following the path of the computer industry but with DNA as the programming language), new possibilities abound.
18. In time, a bioreactor half the size of a swimming pool could produce enough beef to feed 20,000 people for a year (it takes 2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil, and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef).
19. Already we can create food out of thin air, using hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, that is, bacteria that feed on hydrogen. The bacteria are placed in a bioreactor the size of a coffee cup filled with water. The hydrogen food source is created by an electric water splitter that splits the water into its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Atmospheric carbon and a dash of ammonia, phosphorous, and salts fertilise the culture, which ultimately produces a dry powder that is 50 per cent protein, 25 per cent carbohydrate, and 25 per cent fats and nucleic acids. In other words, a complete food. Moreover, the protein can be consumed “as is” by humans. The mixture is actually very nutritious. And because the raw materials for the process are available from the air, the technology can be transported to deserts and areas facing famine.
20. Conventional approaches to irrigation waste 60 per cent or more of the water to runoff and evaporation. Micro-irrigation technologies, on the other hand, deliver with nearly 95 per cent efficiency.
21. Current osmosis technologies yield a freshwater cost of less than $2 per 275 gallons.
22. Properly trained deep learning algorithms are able to detect even the most fleeting of these expressions—including micro-expressions and so derive a great deal of information about a person’s state of mind.
23. Sensors in the car seat can take your temperature, monitor your pulse rate, and even your breathing, further augmenting the system’s cognitive computing abilities, providing additional channels of interactivity in the bargain.
24. Audio sensors can tell if you’re talking aggressively or with anger or frustration. And if the microphone can’t pick up any of this because the windows are rolled down, and the kids are screaming, then the system can actually read your lips.
25. Already a pianist could download a musical score from a skills database into an exoskeleton that would move the wearer’s fingers until the muscle memory is trained.
26. Nissan has developed a new paint formulated with nanoparticles that generate a layer of air between the coating and anything the road might splash upon it.
27. Neuralink is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.
28. Scientists have created entangled pairs of photons and were able to teleport.
29. Augmented and virtual reality technologies are starting to change the need for anything we currently recognise as a user interface (including Alexa)
30. With virtual reality, you soon will be able to simply conjure up the experience you desire. Watch video, check your mail, augment your real-time environment, follow virtual directional arrows to get to your next destination, everything.
31. Distance won’t matter, because they could be holographically present anywhere. Holographic telepresence platforms are already proliferating, allowing people to appear in virtually any location without physically being there. Soon we will be able to appear instantly, anywhere, holographically.

As science fiction novels are increasingly looking more like everyday user manuals, science fiction writers are going to have to get a lot more imaginative.

More

You can read the rest of the blog here. Covering 2050, some tools, questions to ask, mindset and a call to action.