Increasing complexity and uncertainity in our society poses challenges for the successful rise of Real-Time Economy. The future of Real-Time Economy is unpredictable. This is why we need everyone to think about the impact of digitalization on the operations of companies, empowered consumers and individuals alike.

What is a Real Time Economy?

Simply expressed - an environment where transactions of all sorts are mostly digital, increasingly generated automatically and completed in real time both from the business angle and in IT-processing. For enterprises, the public sector and citizens this means for example that orders, confirmations and invoices flow from system to system and payments from account to account without delays. This makes it possible to have automate accounting so that it is always up-to-date. The benefits for society at large are enormous - both for productivity, more meaningful work and for the environment as there is much less need for travelling, transporting and material.

How can we get there fast?

There is no giant leap option. To get there we need to see the stairway and constantly keep moving up. In countries were payment references are in use many important automation features have already been completed. E-banking is an important element and needs to be improved further to cater for the next step - e-invoicing - in itself saving more than 200bn€ processing costs in EU - but even more importantly being the next step to a Real Time Economy.

Next steps

When this ladder is completed, new opportunities for human, business and machine interaction becomes available in the form of real-time services.

As we move to the age of real-time, we see that real-time systems also enable new paradigms characterized by emerging non-real time processes. A good example of this is the shift from broadcast radio to on-demand podcasting, where we move from real-time to my-time. When you have the ability to consume/download media faster than real-time (actually watching it), business models and consumer behaviour will eventually change.

Digital networks link people together in new ways. Service providers can turn themselves into invinsible intermediaries by removing unnecessary services. This development is fueled with observations of the spirit of the age as put forward by 3Com founder and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, that the value of a communication system grows exponentially as it adds users (Metcalfe's Law).

Today, most important emerging internet businesses like Facebook and YouTube get out of the way of their users. Banks and other traditional institutions are following by turning themselves into embedded platforms for business transactions. The Internet has become a hybrid of my-time and real-time, revealing new dimensions for value generation.

Perhaps even more importantly, RTE is the continuation of the information age as described by Marshall McLuhan as an age of all-at-onceness. Space and time are overcome by television, jets, and computer networks. In such an all-at-once world, linear, cause-effect thinking processes give way to a discontinuous integral consciousness and non-linearity, so that points of view, specialist goals, linear schedules, turn-taking and broadcast models are replaced by an overall awareness of the mosaic world of a retribalized society. Processes will have the characteristics of a blink of an eye, rather than the speed of light. To put it differently, RTE is about escaping the age of speed (industrial era) by connecting context with time once again, providing time for reflection, peer production and collective decision making through digital technologies.

Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening. . . . Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously."
- Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967

It's about time... for a Real-Time Economy.

Innovation as a key driver

One of the most important challenge businesses face today because of increased complexity is continuous innovation. A reductionist definition of innovation is the process of commercializing a novel idea. An invention becomes an innovation only through wide adoption, which is usually possible only through commercialization with the aid of centralized resources (although certain mechanisms of commons-based peer production can also deliver innovations with decentralized resources).

Innovation – according to definition – is the key reason why ideas are shared, improved and supported by research activities & service providers within the Real-Time Economy Community. The aim is to:

Seed/conceptualize: Research customer/user/participant needs (led by Real-Time Economy competence center)
Select/experiment: Imagine ideas that meet those needs (led by user-centric design and crowdsourcing platform)
Amplify/implement: Innovate offerings (products and services) that realize those needs (led by investors, service providers, unions and private entrepreneurs)

Organizations can innovate products, services, processes, customer experiences and business models in the context of Real-Time Economy. Users get better service, tools and knowledge. This is the key value proposition of the Real-Time Economy Community.

Most important changes driving innovation today are in the realms of technology, business and society, further supported by changes in media, prosumerism, intellectual property and education. New technologies are in the core of Real-Time Economy. These technologies have the ability to transform the way organizations do business. In return, our society will face changes that are manifested around our societal structures and culture.

RTE Community platform features

Central features of the system include but are not limited to:

Ideas, stories and challenges: this section is the core of the system for generating, improving and implementing ideas around digitalization. "Post an idea" is the central verb while the idea itself is framed with interaction. Main activities include posting ideas, rating ideas, tagging ideas, promoting/demoting ideas, navigating ideas and discussing ideas. Activities are concrete deeds users can do to become notable users in the system - with the label of digital saint applied to all active users. A point-based system is implemented to rank ideas based on user feedback.
Knowledge and research: Interaction around ideas requires knowledge in form of research, reflections, crystallizations and general information. Knowledge about tools, external resources, related services and stories around digitalization can be collaboratively written and edited by the community in a wiki fashion. Earlier versions can be browsed and pages can be linked together.
Contributors and showcases: Various service providers and their showcases can be listed here who provide solutions to the ideas and challenges posted in the ideas section. This section serves as means for linking providers with solution seekers.
Networking: A section for listing users in the system and displaying their profiles and social networks. Users can list their business and personal background related to digitalization. Contact information can be provided, including external web-based profiles. Users can add other users as friends. This functionality can be used as a way to sort ideas in the ideas section.
Presentations: Various media files related to Real-Time Economy can be listed here. This includes videos, podcasts, digital images and powerpoint presentations. Here are some upcoming features: The presentations section will have the ability to frame presentations with interaction (send to friend, link from favorite video sharing site, comment) and link them together through tagging and social navigation. Presentations are adviced to be stored in external content communities like Youtube, Odeo or SlideShare, so that each media file receives maximum exposure on the web.
Front page: the entry page that displays what is new in the community. This can include custom content from the wiki like theme of the week, general information and some automatically generated content like notable (active) users and featured idea.
Blog: An official blog based on Wordpress is used to provide news and a voice for the maintainers of the community to promote conversation around the service.

Other features include:

Every feature in the system provides a RSS feed for easy subscription to updates.
Researchers can provide a test for the level of digitaliztion within an organization (coming soon)
APIs can be used to post ideas from mobile devices or third party applications (desktop or web-based) (coming soon)
Inviting friends to join the service

User participation and interaction

We have to take into account the unpredictable consequenses of launching the Real-Time Economy. Effectiveness to do so requires the involvement of those who own its destiny: participatory markets operating in the context of complex responsive processes of relating. Success is related to the validation of the ideaviruses as much as empowerment of the interaction, that's why RTE Community is based around the idea of sharing and interaction.

Sharing of ideas leads to understanding, refinement, synthesis and connection of key ideas into new business solutions. Creative RTE Community will be the virtual planetary mind – or the meaning harbouring space, desribed by Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida as Ba - of the Real-Time Economy.

RTE Community aims to provide a crowdsourcing platform for promoting the involvement – and interaction – among stakeholders, researchers, students, small businesses, service providers, grassroots and other decentralized and loosely connected interest groups. Keyword is humbleness and the solution to compensate cognitive limits is to engage in intensive communication: no-one knows the answer, therefore we have to avoid the cost of not-knowing by sharing.

Benefits of being a member

If there is a key challenge or idea that you have faced during your free-time or work-time, why not share it with everyone else and nurture it into a working solution?

RTE Community catalyzes better service, better productivity, better jobs, better top-line, better bottom-line, better environment, better coactivity (co-innovation, co-intelligence, collaboration) and perhaps, better change. As an ecosystem, RTE Community will provide the most important platform in Europe for innovation around ideas concerning digitalization.

The bottom-line is: RTE Community will reveal important ideas promoting cost-savings, increasing competetiveness, well-being and new modes of effectiveness related to the implementation of digital technologies.

Everything starts from making real-time transactions a reality, but in the horizon we can already perceive just-in-time learning, real-time decision making, participatory services and collective intelligence.

"The future of Real-Time Economy is not created, but co-created."
– Teemu Arina, designer of the Real-Time Economy Communty platform

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