Business-webs, value chain integrators, and other new types of inter-organizational alliances abound these days. They are called into being by:

• Incapacity of classic business models to match the requirements of generating value in the knowledge economy

• Availability of a powerful new medium for fostering local and global collaboration, shared learning, and coordination of action in dynamic webs of value creation

"New technologies offer the promise of completely redefining relations between suppliers and consumers across the value chain, leading to a global digital economy where consumers and businesses can seamlessly and dynamically come together and where value constellations are assembled on the fly in response to constantly changing, highly customised market demands." (European Commission, Directorate-General "Information Society Technologies" — IST 2000 Action Line II.3.1.)

When organizations need to make rapid decision about their choices of value creation models and methods, facing the combined challenges of complexity multiplied by uncertainty multiplied by urgency, there's nothing more practical than a robust conceptual framework.

Our contribution to build such a shared framework is presented in a set of questions that follow.

To reach the vantage point from which complex questions—such as the ones in the previous section—can be best addressed, we need step back from them, look at the longer and broader sweeps of human history, and find the few simple principles which can be helpful to find the answers. The two sets of double helix presented in this section contain those principles.

1. Organizational capabilities co-evolve with advances in symbol manipulation technologies

The new technologies and new organizing paradigms are in a positive feedback loop that drives the creation of new value.

This diagram shows one cycle of the human/tool system's double helix in movement. Moving from the top of glyph clockwise, you can trace the dynamics of:

how inter-networked organizations and other emergent value constellations (new patterns of organizing commerce)

call for

technologies supporting personal and organizational knowledge ecosystems (new ways of using the power of technologies)

which enable, for example,

the self-organization of e-lancers into ad-hoc project teams that may market themselves via public auctions (new forms of social interactions and coordination)

which bring about

the elimination of systemic inefficiencies and higher level performance (as a result of unleashing individual and collective creativity and distributed intelligence)

which enhances

the clusters of dynamic value constellations (the new patterns of organizing),

and spirals back to the starting point of the cycle, at a higher level of capabilities.

The complexity of the new economy's challenges is daunting. The good news is that humankind has never created an evolutionary test for itself, that it couldn't pass. The bad news is that this time around we may or may not have such luck.

It depends largely on our capacity to make sense, validate and integrate the various frameworks that exist for assessing the value creation models of the knowledge economy, in the practice of designing dynamic value constellations.

The three models presented below describe different aspects of the new business and knowledge landscapes. None of them is complete in itself but together they provide some stepping stones towards an integrated framework which will let organizations design more robust and adaptive strategies.

The "experience economy" framework of value creation is presented in the table below.