The Insight

Work on this book started in March 2006, when I was covering O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies (eTech) conference in San Diego for Linux Journal. The conference theme was “The Attention Economy.” Sitting in the audience taking notes, I thought, Why build an economy around attention, when intention is where the money comes from? So I wrote an article, on the spot, titled, “The Intention Economy.” An excerpt:

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them …

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In the Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that …

The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.

In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, “I’ll be skiing in Park City from March 20–25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz One Club. I don’t want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?”—and have the sellers compete for the buyer’s business.¹

Positive buzz followed, but development didn’t, and that’s what the Intention Economy needed. So, several months later, when I was given a fellowship at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, I decided to launch a development project toward making the Intention Economy happen. We called it ProjectVRM.²

VRM stood for vendor relationship management—the customer-side counterpart of CRM, or customer relationship management, a business that appears to most of us in the form of junk mail and call centers. ProjectVRM’s goal was to cause development of tools that would make individuals both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them. In other words, to fix a broken system from the customer side by developing a new system complementary to existing businesses and built on the natural independence and agency of human beings.

Behind ProjectVRM was a thesis:

Free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

And, as a corollary,

Free markets require free customers.

Since CRM was already a multibillion-dollar business category, ProjectVRM was a highly ambitious undertaking. But I was neither alone nor early. In the United Kingdom, Iain Henderson, Alan Mitchell, and others had already started the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum and were doing work on what they called personal data stores—an essential VRM tool. Adriana Lukas, also in the U.K., had similar goals for both her consultancy and her blogging company, and was encouraging development work as well. The digital identity development community had also been working on some of the same problems, encouraged by the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshops (IIWs), which Kaliya Hamilin, Phil Windley, and I started in 2005.

At Berkman, ProjectVRM consisted of myself, a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, and gatherings in the form of meetings and workshops. It still does. Out in the world, however, it has grown to consist of dozens of development efforts and hundreds of individuals, all working in their own ways to create tools that liberate customers and build the Intention Economy. This book is a progress report on that work and the evolving ideas behind it.

The Book

I hadn’t planned to write this book before we had lots of working code, but two events in early 2009 changed my mind. The first was a breakfast in Toronto with my friend Rick Segal, who was then a venture capitalist there. Rick told me, in a way that could hardly be more emphatic if he had slammed me into a wall, “You have to write a book! You already have a title! It’s The Intention Economy! Stop screwing around! Go write it!” The other was a talk I gave by the same title a few weeks later at the Berkman Center.³ Among those at the talk was Jeff Kehoe of Harvard Business Review Press. Jeff came up to me afterward and asked if I had considered making my talk into a book. With Rick’s command still ringing in my ears, I said yes. The result is now in your hands.

Most VRM tools today are either early in development or just starting to be adopted. Many of the ideas and assumptions about VRM and the Intention Economy are also far from proven and easy to dismiss in proof’s absence. We are at the early edge of the technology adoption cycle. Author Geoffrey Moore’s famous chasm between innovators and early adopters is still ahead of us.⁴

So why would both Rick and Jeff want me to write a book about something that hasn’t happened yet and probably will not start to happen for another several years? Two reasons: reality and promise. In reality, e-commerce—a huge forward leap on the economy’s supply side—had already happened. But it was only the first shoe to drop. The promise was a forward leap on the demand side, by individual customers. That shoe is VRM. We don’t know where it will drop first, but do we know the foot wearing it will be the customer’s. The Intention Economy will then step forward with both shoes, on both feet: supply on one side and demand on the other. No more hopping along on the supply side alone.

Because we are dealing with the future here, much of what you read in this book is speculative. In fact, I am willfully practicing what Nassim Nicholas Taleb (in The Black Swan) calls “epistemic arrogance.” He says this “bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown).”⁵ But I am not just making guesses here. I am also looking for effects, and I have influence over the causes of those effects. So do many others in the VRM movement, some far better equipped than I. Those intentions add up. After that, they multiply.

I have also seen this kind of intention work before—in particular with free software, open source, and Linux, all three of which I’ve been covering since the mid-nineties for Linux Journal. So, while I base what I can on facts and solid sources, I am also working with a lot of other people to make the Intention Economy happen.

There are sure to be many different kinds of responses to this book and its purposes, but the only ones that matter are ones we can use. Thus, I invite you to use the tools we develop, to give helpful feedback, and to weigh in with your own ideas and development efforts. The frontier is wide open, and opportunities abound. You can see them best if you realize the full value of free customers and how much work we have left to do. If this book succeeds, some of that work will be yours.