FutureEverything

Geof Cox is interested in the way emergent online ‘peer production’ and ‘collaborative consumption’ business models – and especially those arising out of open source approaches to intellectual property – relate to the burgeoning social enterprise movement.  The big question is whether the new possibilities for more dispersed and democratic organisational forms naturally align with social enterprise’s attachment to participative and responsible ways of doing business – or if this apparent coherence is merely a latent potential that could well be wasted, unless both digital activists and social entrepreneurs recognise the opportunity and consciously develop it into a new way of organising human affairs.

In the social enterprise world there is a clear and present danger of uncritical acceptance of big conventional business approaches in key areas like intellectual property and financial instrumentation, especially around approaches to growth and replication.  Geof Cox first raised these issues in a paper to the 2004 Open University Social Enterprise Research Conference on Social Enterprise & Intellectual Property, and recently re-ignited the debate in The Guardian Social Enterprise Network with a guest blog on Learning from the Open Source Movement.  As key advisor to the current national roll-out of the miEnterprise supported self-employment programme he is actively engaged in developing a form of collaborative growth that specifically rejects ‘social franchise’ approaches, but can combine economies of scale with local empowerment, coherent development with free knowledge, a recognised brand with quirky individuality.