Towards the Next Economy

tl;dr: The Next Economy is signified by Digitalization as a social phenomenon, Postgrowth as economic context, and Sustainability as normative reference frame.

Recently I was provided the opportunity to speak about my research at 12min.me in the co-working/social start-ups incubator Wizeman.Space in Stuttgart. The format is intended to give you 12 minutes of concentrated presentation followed by 12 minutes of discussion (YouTube vid of my talk is available, but only in German). Focusing the past years of research so that they could fit into 12 minutes was a challenge, but it proved to be very productive and inspiring. The Next Economy, following Peter Drucker‘s notion of a Next Society and Dirk Baecker‘s ideas on a system-theoretical description for what comes next, is often envisaged to be centered around digital technologies and their widespread use. To me the Next Economy is much more than that. It encapsulates Digitalization as a social phenomenon and new ways of organizing economic activities beyond classical organizations and, in its logical extent, beyond the market logic of transactions. At the same time, the Next Economy can no longer be a growth-oriented economy. There are economic limits to growth, as empirically evidenced by phenomena like secular stagnation and diminishing productivity returns on innovations, and there are ecological limits to growth, evidenced by a dramatic overshoot of the planet’s ecological carrying capacity and planetary boundaries. Postgrowth becomes a new economic context for the Next Economy with severe strategic implications for companies. The third “orbit” for the Next Economy is Sustainability. Sustainability itself merges with Digitalization towards something that can be called Sustainability 4.0. But most importantly, Sustainability provides a new normative reference frame, an almost endless pool of meaning construction for economic activities within the Next Economy. All of these three phenomena – Digitalization, Postgrowth, Sustainability – are in the orbit of the Next Economy and will shape the coming reality of the next decades. It is an exciting time to be alive and to do research and I am always deeply gratified by being able to engage in a conversation with non-academics about it. Only if there is some form of transdisciplinarity, of engagement between academia and non-academia,  new ideas and insights about this new world can be constructed.

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