Generating ideas, inspiring innovation
And moving forward with a game plan for developing a supply chain business model that can help workers and communities flourish.
My project with Robert Brooks is underway, and this edition reports our progress. What follows is an initial framework of a new supply chain business model designed from scratch to help workers and communities thrive. We channel inspiration from Proximity, a guiding light for the future-focused application of technology, and from a conversation with Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton, leaders in the Biomimicry movement, as featured on the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett. Brooks and I offer an innovation hypothesis, a business model, an ethos to enable essential behaviors, and a way forward to help us aim for the best outcomes for humankind, enhanced—not coerced—by technology. We are just beginning, and our work is better with feedback. I invite you to read our newsletters and notes, join our conversation, and share our work with others.
A little help? Share this edition with anyone who might find inspiration in bold ideas and conversations with a community of innovators.
Inspiration for innovation
Last week, Brooks and I worked at Story Coffee in a newly developed building called The Sluice—a fitting space for imagining a supply chain to help workers and communities thrive. Initially serving as a general store for miners in 1860, The Sluice has been reinvented as a vibrant hub for art, work, sustenance, and community. It houses offices, studios, a gallery, a coffee shop, and an amphitheater for meetings and entertainment—creating a dynamic environment for work and collaboration, aligning perfectly with our objectives for a new supply chain business model.
Inspired by architecture and fueled by caffeine, we created an innovation hypothesis to guide our design. It's a little wordy, but every word has its function:
We aim to design a business model to help workers and communities thrive, enabling society to navigate fundamental shifts such as labor shortages, artificial intelligence, wealth inequality, renewable energy, and the transition to a sustainable economy. The supply chain, a global institution that connects and serves every human, plays a critical role in this vision. With its last mile—distribution—being an $8 trillion industry comprising one-third of the economy, the supply chain has the potential to create change and address society's most pressing needs.
Our innovation hypothesis is anchored by the idea that distributors must transform from mainly adding value to products to becoming human-centered, digital-age intermediaries. This transformation involves creating value by integrating a radical mix of knowledge and resources, including data, connectivity, technological expertise, modern work practices, apprenticeships, continuing education, financing, and more. Distributors will expand their traditional supplier base to include new vendors, startups, incubators, and educators, leveraging their unique tribal knowledge gained from working across industries and applications as community-embedded local companies.
Our model is not defined by managing warehouses stocked with products to fulfill orders but by hosting a “collaboration space” for imagining solutions, aligning resources, and solving problems. This space is not merely physical but a mental arena where workers, businesses, educators, social impact organizations, and community leaders gather—virtually and physically—to develop solutions and make them happen.
Digging in, we imagine this collaboration space as an environment enriched with people and assets, including human facilitators, data analytics, artificial intelligence tools, and the necessary products, equipment, systems, and parts to enhance collaborative processes. While the space includes adaptable physical locations, it primarily exists in real-world projects where radical collaborations can flourish.
Brooks and I discussed the enablers, or forces, that would ensure the successful impact of our new business model. Incumbent distributors are legitimized by the brands they represent and the portfolio of products they offer, which necessarily aligns them with supplier interests more than community outcomes. Our new model will provide products, of course, but we seek to establish a relentless focus, executed through behaviors, on improving outcomes for workers and communities. We decided that “ethos statements” would be our first step—declarations of core values that shape our value proposition, business processes, capabilities, and metrics. We offer five such statements to guide our work and ask for your feedback:
Measure success as wealth per capita by community. We recommend using GDP per capita as it is an essential measure of a community's productivity and prosperity. However, to more directly address our goal of helping workers thrive, we suggest developing a robust, comprehensive wealth index. This measure would encompass various forms of wealth, including financial assets, health and well-being, social connections, and more.
Embrace holistic self-expression and creativity. Traditionally, distributors are seen as the last mile of the supply chain, an institution defined by delivering products to buyers. However, we envision the employees of our new business model as the front line in engaging customers as fellow humans. They will bring forward their unique skills and creative attitudes, fostering an environment where personal authenticity and innovation help workers and communities thrive.
Value deep questions and continuous inquiry. Our project—helping workers and communities thrive—is difficult, complex, and never-ending. Incumbent distributors offer products to solve immediate problems. Our new model will do that, but always as a “forever process” executed as a curious, collaborative, and community-wide quest for improved quality of life, work, business, and prosperity.
Empower progress through shared knowledge. In our envisioned future, community prosperity arises from pooling and acting on data and information contributed by all institutions— industry, government, education, social impact organizations, and more. Our new business model will contribute experiences, insights, and solutions from diverse industries and applications. By leading the use of data-driven decision-making powered by generative AI, we aim to foster collaboration and fact-enabled progress.
Enable learning, aspirations, and commitment. Current business strategy and process design centers on meeting customer needs, measures loyalty as repeat purchases, and demands short-term returns and growth. Our future-focused business model will go further, enabling the aspirations of workers and rewarding the committed actions of suppliers and customers. Life-long learning is a core process, including apprenticeships, digital transformation, customer relationships, and professional development.
We see our new supply chain business model as harnessing the power of markets to benefit communities, the building blocks of society. Our project blends personal experiences and values across generations and reflects differing opinions, expectations, and the words and phrases to communicate them. It's a negotiation, and it's working.
About the artwork
In many previous editions, I have argued for a more human-centered supply chain that existed not just to move and deliver products but instead exists to improve customers' lives. This idea has resonated with many of my readers, but it has not done enough to visualize new business models or to reform innovation values and methods.
Searching for a better way forward, I stumbled across biomimicry—the practice of learning from and emulating nature's genius to solve human design challenges. For supply chain innovators, nature's innovations represent billions of years of R&D, balancing competition and collaboration to achieve solutions that work: progress and evolution without stagnation and harm.
Brooks and I will apply the principles of biomimicry as we continue to develop our vision of a supply chain business model designed to help workers and communities flourish. But to get started, we worked with ChatGPT and Leonardo.AI to craft an image that combines our innovation hypothesis with the principles of biomimicry. Our AI co-artists offered this narrative and the image at the top of this edition:
Create an abstract image representing a supply chain inspired by biomimicry. Highlight interconnected ecosystems, adaptive cycles, and sustainable resource use with motifs such as tree branches, honeycombs, and river flows. Blend these natural patterns with subtle references to supply chain elements like gears and conveyor belts. Use earthy, vibrant colors—greens, blues, and browns with bright accents—to symbolize growth, flow, stability, innovation, and energy. Convey a sense of balance, interconnectedness, and forward-thinking innovation, illustrating how supply chain management can learn from and emulate nature's wisdom.
A way forward
Careful readers will notice I am a little behind schedule in publishing this edition. In part, my delay is due to family issues, working through the passing of my mother after a long battle with cancer. And Brooks and I have had to find our footing as collaborators on our project.
But there's more! With this edition, I am doubling down on using Substack Notes, short-form microblogs available to readers on the Substack App. I have several ready to go and will publish them soon, along with other Notes from Brooks. If you only read our work as newsletters delivered to your inbox, I encourage you to join us on the app.
I will soon launch a podcast, Food for the Supply Chain Soul. To get started, I will read my editions aloud and offer additional, spontaneous comments. I hope to provide interviews, panels, AMAs (Ask Me Anythings), and additional dialogues in the near future—all in pursuit of an ever-advancing discourse on innovation and the future of distribution and the supply chain.
Finally, we are working on plans for a Substack Chat, a place for conversations prompted across all of my work published as a multimedia platform with newsletters, notes, and podcast episodes—all at the intersection of art, science, and technology, and inspired by the insights, experiences, and values of innovators and the coming generations.
As always, please leave your comments below or reach out at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.
Robert Brooks contributed to this edition.