8 innovations that could update our economic system (and how we consume)

The following is an excerpt from an article Otto Scharmer, the brains behind U.Lab, wrote in 2014 about the power to change systems with innovation:

There are eight institutional innovations that, as a set, could update the economic system to operate more intelligently across silos and boundaries by shifting the economic logic from ego-to eco-system awareness:

1. Nature

Instead of treating nature’s gifts as commodities that we buy, use, and throw away, treat the natural world as an eco-system that we need to cultivate.

2. Entrepreneurship

Reinvent our concept of labour and rather than thinking of work as a “job” think about it as passion-led entrepreneurship.

3. Money

Reinvent our concept of money. Instead of extractive, capital should be intentional, serving rather than harming the real economy.

4. Technology

Reinvent how we develop technologies. Empower all people to be makers and creators rather than passive recipients.

5. Leadership

Instead of individual super-egos, we need to build the capacity to co-sense and co-shape the future on the level of the whole system.

6. Consumption

Rather than promoting consumerism and using metrics like GDP, move towards sharing and collaborative consumption, and using measurements of well-being such as Gross National Happiness (GNH) and the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI).

7. Governance

Reinvent how we coordinate. Move toward complementing the three older mechanisms (hierarchies, markets, and special interest groups) through a fourth mechanism: acting from shared awareness, from seeing the whole.

8. Ownership

Advance the old forms of state and private ownership by creating a third category of ownership rights: commons-based ownership that better protects the interests of future generations.

These eight “acupuncture points”, as a set, could help us to shift the old outdated capitalism into a 21st-century economy that creates wellbeing for all.