What Is This Thing Called the Attention Economy - Tim Kastelle, Innovation Leadership Network

Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention:

The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that we live in an information economy. We remember from Econ.1 that economics studies “the allocation of scarce commodities that have alternative uses.” But information is not a scarce commodity; we’re drowning in it. What is scarce is the human attention needed to make sense of it. We really live in an attention economy. What does such an economy look like? What are we to make of it?That attention is in short supply seems to be born in upon us from all sides. From frantic multi-tasking two-career parents to soldiers in computerized fox holes or pilots inundated by cockpit information, we’re all drowning in a sea of information.

This is important for innovation. Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation – so innovation is a knowledge-based exercise. But having ideas is only part of the process. You also have to able to select the best ideas to invest in, be able to execute ideas, and then get ideas to spread.

Getting ideas to spread is often a challenge – especially for smaller organisations that aren’t very well connected within the network of the economy. This is where the value of the attention economy concept lies – it makes you explicitly think about whatever product or service you provide as information, as an idea – and it makes you think about how to get that idea to spread.

Part of getting ideas to spread is based on the idea of influence. I ran across this interesting video about influence and the spread of ideas on Rasul Sha’ir’s blog (his original post has some useful comments on the video as well) – and it’s worth watching:

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

The best way to think about influencers and the role that they play in spreading ideas is by thinking about the economy as a network. When you start thinking this way, the structure of the network can provide some insight into where influence might lie.

This really brief interview with Valdis Krebs from Angela Dunn shows how this works:

Here are the key points from all of this:

• Innovations are ideas – in fact, they are the result of connecting ideas in a novel way.
• In order to successfully innovate, you have to get these new ideas to spread. There are two concepts that can help you do this more effectively:
• Think about the economy as competition for attention. We’re not really competing for resources anymore, we’re competing for peoples’ time and attention.
• The attention economy plays out across economic networks. This means that network analysis is an important tool to support innovation efforts. In order to compete successfully within the attention economy, you need to understand the connections through which influence and attention flow.

The Innovation Leadership Network blog is written by Tim Kastelle and John Steen. We are members of the Technology & Innovation Management Centre in the School of Business at the University of Queensland.