Course on Socio-Economics at Helsinki University
I have just come back (on Wednesday night) from Helsinki. I was invited to present our work on socio-economics, more specifically on developing a so-called toolkit for evaluating value chain dynamics. This work originated from my involvement with the Communications Futures Program at MIT. From 2004 to 2006, I co-chaired the Value Chain Dynamics working group, together with Prof. Charlie Fine. One of its outcomes was a first attempt to provide a coherent set of tools that would allow a case investigator to evaluate value chain dynamics of specific examples.
In our work within the PSIRP project, we developed this toolkit further. It is now based on a set of mind map graphs, which are then filled in by the case investigator – based on instructions given in the notes and comments embedded in the mind maps.
We use this toolkit for three purposes:
- market evaluation: when developing a particular (technical) solution to a problem, even as big as the Future Internet in the case of PSIRP, we would like to understand the viability of such solution under the impact of an evolving socio-economic environment. In other words, we complement technical evaluation (e.g., evaluating delay, stretch and other technical parameters) with a socio-economic evaluation by understanding the (viable) markets that this solution might create. This, in turn, gives us a better understanding of the viability of the solution itself. Currently, we evaluate the rendezvous solution within PSIRP with this method.
- design choice evaluation: components or functions of technical architectures usually hold a variety of possible design choices for their realization. While we can evaluate the technical ability of their realization, it still often leaves us with a range of possible choices – all of them more or less technically feasible. In order to further restrict the set of design choices to be considered in a final design, we use the toolkit to derive socio-economic scenarios that would allow us to exclude (or at least limit) the possibility of particular choice. In other words, we limit the desirable design space. Currently, we evaluate the topology formation within PSIRP with this method.
- opportunities or threats: while the above methods focus on the overall ecosystem (and architecture), there is a more player-specific usage for the toolkit. This identifies opportunities (or threats) for particular market players to take advantage of a (possibly new) solution being developed. This is close to the original usage of the toolkit within the CFP consortium.
The course at Helsinki University was conducted with about 10 students investigating choices of their own (ranging from presence over emergency service provisioning to the recently announced Nokia Money solution) with the toolkit. Being divided into two camps, according to usage 1 and 2 above, the students set out to apply the steps within the toolkit, eventually leading to a system dynamics model that can be analyzed analytically!
To my surprise, the students progressed faster than expected. After having listened to my introduction to the toolkit and some preparatory work of their own beforehand, they all progressed through the steps in a very satisfactory fashion. Although the beginning seemed hard, staring at an almost blank canvas in the mind mapping tool, it appeared that the steps given in the toolkit facilitated an understanding of the cases at hand that allowed all student to finally develop a first system dynamics (SD) model in Vensim!
There is obviously still a way to go until real analytical results will be obtained. Necessary desk research needs to be conducted, interviews are to be arranged, and the entire process will need to become an iterative refinement process. But the initial phase has shown that the promise of the toolkit, namely to provide not only a record of one’s modeling activities but also to guide the thoughts of the case investigators, has been fulfilled. There is no other explanation for the fact that all students, after a mere 5 hours of toolkit application, were able to start their SD modeling work.
This is promising. It was a first test with very good results. More work needs to be done, for which this course provided useful insight. I’m sure that this is not the last we have seen from this work.