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An interesting proposal, but one which might bar future cooperative/franchise operations, where consumers get together en masse.

The model could derive from the major Finnish grocery stores which centralize logistics, marketing, branding and marketing for supply to the local area franchisees. These existing chains profess to be cooperatives - or member-owned, with member benefits and discounts, but they actually have expensive top-down bureaucracies. I imagine a model where such a management level would be hired to provide a management service to the members - but the members would decide on strategies, including profit-sharing.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Feb 13th, 2012 at 10:54:39 AM EST
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The main difficulty would be drafting rules which would work well for the co-op / non-profit sector, but could not be subverted by corporate wolves in sheep's clothing.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Mon Feb 13th, 2012 at 10:59:42 AM EST
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It is the coops that will diminish the power of the corporate wolves. As Chris Cook  has pointed out, a coop or other peer-to-peer networked organization can be nimbler, more flexible and a lot cheaper to run, and thus will heavily compete on price and service.

The wolves (banks eg) can still be employed to provide fixed-cost national and international services, but even that role would diminish with the adoption of better data governance and master data management. I think MDM offers the possibility of making redundant a lot of management hocus-pocus, and without that...

As corporations increasingly move their focus to the so-called UX or user experience, they are also ceding more and more power to the consumers of their products or services. For the corporations this will not end well. But I am, as usual, being too optimistic.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Feb 13th, 2012 at 11:20:23 AM EST
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