Guilds 2.0 - A 21st Century Economic Organization for Collective Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The idea of re-introducing historical craft guilds as the foundation for a 21st Century economic (and social) organizational structure for youth is proposed. As youth struggle to find individual pathways to gainful employment, the idea of establishing collective organizational structures could lead to more resilient and viable approaches to skills development, entrepreneurial opportunities and economic development.
Written by Luc Lalande
Historical craft guilds, as a mode of industrial organization, survived for more than half a millennium until the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Recent academic research point to a far more nuanced view of guilds as enablers of innovation and far more adaptable to market opportunities than originally thought.
Guilds 2.0 should be designed as organizational experiments to promote and accelerate “collective” innovation and develop market opportunities for its members.
I propose that today’s young talent might be willing to experiment with guild-type organizational structures founded on shared values, peer-to-peer learning and project-driven market opportunities.
I became further intrigued by the notion that the democratization of such tools could gradually “shift” economic power back to the owners of creative skills in localized production from the owners of capital used for mass production in centralized factories. This thought path eventually led me to discover a book that re-examined the role of guilds in the early modern pre-industrial European economy. It was a fascinating read. The book offered new insights on how historical craft guilds fostered learning-by-doing, innovation, technological change and entrepreneurship.
The third and final source of inspiration for considering guilds as a potential organizational structure for young people was a 2005 publication by the Kauffman Foundation entitled “Understanding Entrepreneurship”. In the report, Professor Scott Stern (winner of the first Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship) wrote:
“An organizational experiment is the development and implementation of a novel value-creation and value-capture system. Organizational experimentation links individuals and organizations in the pursuit of exploiting the interaction between market and technical opportunities. In sharp contrast to the canonical image of a lone inventor single-mindedly pursuing a technical vision, entrepreneurs pursuing organizational experiments must assemble and appropriate incentives and a coordination for a larger team.”
The intent of this initiative is to establish a novel organizational structure modelled after historical craft guilds to create both economic and learning opportunities for youth. A makerspace (located on a university campus) with the requisite digital fabrication tools will serve as host infrastructure. The proposed organization will be branded as the STEAMakers Guild combining the relevance of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) education and the Maker Movement.
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