Business Strategy in the Era of the Internet of Value
Whether a business is centuries old or just releasing their first product, the current environment presents a range of challenges. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of the sincerity of legacy brands as well as some of the leading digital service providers. Some might even go so far as to say that an erosion of trust has occurred. At the same time, businesses continue to be enamored by the capacity of digital environments, objects, experiences, and marketplaces to captivate these disaffected – and particularly younger – consumers in order to generate strong returns on investment, while also potentially supporting enhanced sustainability.
To address the challenges and opportunities presented by this context, new technology is facilitating an “Internet of Value” defined by:
A transition from an exchange of data, information, location, sites, and pages modeled on publishing and how humans read and take in information, to a web where various types of value are exchanged and informed between nodes.
The rise of an internet where value is encoded in a variety of manners including kilowatt-hours, gallons, hours used, energy input, cost, price, labor, reputation, user feedback, settings that produce an effect (i.e. light level / luminosity), temperature, metabolic rate, change rate, etc.
These values, in turn, will be informed by the data that defines their context.
Human action will not necessarily directly affect these specific values. Instead, these values will be affected by a broader situation comprised of one or many agents engaged in a higher level activity like driving a car through a city or gathering for a meal with friends at home.
The result will be processes and experiences that are both richer and more efficient because they are effectively running on a system designed for exchanging value and with a capacity to both conserve existing embedded value and create new value through the coordination of the network.
This Internet of Value is facilitated by Tokenization, Blockchain, Industry 4.0 (TBI). For our purposes, Industry 4.0 includes IoT, ML/AI, AR/VR, robotics and advanced manufacturing, and human / machine hybridization. These new technologies can accomplish a range of things:
Tokenization creates a digital corollary of objects, assets, and commodities–among others. These tokens serve as the single source of truth (SST). They provide the orientation within a massive data set and, in doing so, makes that data legible.
Blockchain is the most conducive architecture for organizing such tokens in a way that these dense centers of data and encoding of value are secure, not corrupted, audit ready, and accessible in the right way with the right level of knowledge at the appropriate time and place.
I4.0 is relevant as the assembly process when a token goes from a fungible commodity into a non-fungible object or from a fungible to non-fungible token that can be consumed, collected, or even become a new commodity as competition drives prices down and minimal differentiation between products exists within the market.
In this article, we explore the strategic use of this technology and then how to deploy such strategies through a shift of focus from enterprise to industry architecture, capitalizing on the resonance of things and experiences, and shifting to the production of fewer things that are higher quality with more digital assets associated with them. In addition, we introduce the Adults in the Room Protocol (AITR Protocol) as a means of Standardizing & guaranteeing the quality of Tokenization, Blockchain, and Industry 4.0 (see AITR (Adults in the Room) Protocol: For standardizing and guaranteeing the quality of the deployment of Tokenization, Blockchain, and Industry 4.0, Nomic Consulting, 2023).