Long-tail economics extended to physical objects

Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine, gave an excellent talk on August 5, 2010 at the PARC Forum. He explained how the long-tail economic models which have driven digital content (allowing consumers to access books, music, and movies in the 80% of the market that is not blockbusters) are now starting to appear in the world of physical goods.

The process of realizing long-tail economics in any sector is that of going one-to-many; democratizing the tools of creation, then the tools of production, and finally the tools of distribution. This is what happened with internet content such as publishing, where it is now easy for anyone to create, produce, and distribute content with blogs, twitter feeds, YouTube, etc. This has also happened with other digital content and some physical goods that are ordered and distributed via internet models (e.g.; Amazon, Zappos, etc.).

The new industrial revolution, argues Anderson, is in opensource hardware factories. The supply chain has now opened up to the digital and the small. The ability to make and distribute anything massively decentralizes traditional manufacturing and could completely reorganize industrial economies…atoms are the new bits. Matthew Sobol’s holons (communities of local resilience and sustainability) are in the works. Goods can be self-designed or crafted from available digital designs (e.g.; communities like ShapeWays and Ponoko), and then printed locally on the MakerBot or ordered from Alibaba or other global manufacturies. Opensource manufacturing is starting to have an impact on industries like auto design and construction (e.g.; Local Motors), drones (e.g.; DIY Drones), and general hardware design (empowered by the Beagle Board and Arduino).

It is likely that long-tail economics can be applied to many other areas. Medicine is the next obvious example, where health care, health maintenance, drug development, and disease treatment are already starting to shift into n=1 or n=small group tiers of greater customization and ideally, lower cost as more precision is obtained in the measuring and understanding of disease and wellness.

Future of health social networks

Peer-based health networks are poised to become a powerful member of the health care ecosystem with an expanding role, possibly having influence in policy, ethics, regulation, research and finance. It will be interesting to see how health social network identity develops and is expressed since a health social network is simultaneously an aggregation of individuals and an institution with its own leadership, goals and agenda.

In other sectors, social networks have sought to maintain neutrality by “only providing the platform,” for example peer-to-peer finance sites like Prosper. It is too early to forecast what will happen with health social networks, but PatientsLikeMe as the flagship example has an on-site research staff and appears to be quite involved in administering and orchestrating the patient community, with a collaborative stance towards traditional medicine.

Internet-expert Clay Shirky notes the progressive stages of social network activity which seem to be unfolding in lockstep in health social networks: initially sharing, then collaborating, and finally organizing for collective action. In addition to external collective action, the internal peer support of health social networks could evolve into positive-impact peer pressure, for example, health social network users competing to lower key biomarker scores like cholesterol and blood pressure, using third-party test uploads from LabCorp to measure and validate the results.

Health social networks could develop into large-scale online aggregated communities with market power, providing visibility into demanded research and remedies and directing and funding research priorities.

Health social networks can facilitate long-tail medicine, allowing small groups of cure-seekers and interested researchers to meet.

One future example could be the CureTogether migraine community raising $50,000 in crowd-sourced funding, reviewing and approving grant applications, open-sourcing the research findings on the website, developing remedies and testing them in patient-run clinical trails; this is a new twist on the OpenBasicResearch.org idea. Health social networks could become a key quantitative indicator and independent barometer of demand for medical research, a useful input to the research agenda-setting of the NSF, pharmaceutical companies and academia.

Note: The author is an advisor to CureTogether. The concept of long-tail medicine is described in more depth on p. 26 of Emerging Patient-Driven Healthcare Models.