GREAT JOBS AS A SERVICE (GJAAS)
— THE CUSTOMER NEEDS TO EARN A LIVING
“Great Jobs As A Service (GJAAS) — The Customer Needs to Earn A Living ” is the provocative theme of the i4j Yearly Summit 2017. i4j Innovation for Jobs is a leadership forum that i co-chair together with my co-founder Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet. At the i4j Summit, entrepreneurs, funders, educators, policymakers and other leaders from the innovation-for-jobs ecosystem will be talking shop around the business of disrupting unemployment.
From the worker’s point of view, a job is a service for earning a living. Every worker wants a good service, but it is difficult to find one. People will pull strings, lie and bribe just in order to get a job that is far from perfect for them, just because there is such a shortage of good jobs. It is not much different from how it was buying an automobile in the Soviet Union. Nowadays, in post-communist Russia people can buy any car they want, provided they earn enough. People need to earn in order to spend, that’s the problem and the market is not addressing well enough. Business people might say that their job is to sell things to people, not to earn money for them — this they should do themselves. But that is wrong. Business is about generating revenues and profits by doing transactions. It shouldn’t matter if the transaction makes the customer earn or spend, as long as it is a good business. Agents earn money by helping artists and writers earn money. With modern technology, every worker could have a personal agent helping them earn better, in more meaningful ways. Most people need more and better offers to earn better. Such offers are rare. They already have lots of offers to spend better. Helping people spend is the bandwagon.
So let’s look closer at the idea of good-jobs-as-a-service, GJAAS. Here the earner/worker is the customer and the service provider can take on the role of an employer or any other role that can offer the service to the worker. A good provider will invest heavily in smart AI technology for profiling, matching and improving human capital to find earners better work than they can find themselves, offer them better income, benefits, stability, interesting things to do together with good people, whereof some become friends. That’s far more than most people can arrange on their own, it is what keeps the customer hooked and they will be happy to pay a commission on every dollar the service earns them — like with eBay or any other market place. To serve the earner might even be better than serving the spender, because when the spender runs out of money the provider loses a customer.
So seen as a service market, how is this labor market performing? Not good, the customers are not happy, to say the least. The good news is: the world’s largest service market is ready to be disrupted by innovative new models for better satisfying the customers needs and wants. How large is the market opportunity for this? Huge! Here is an estimate:
5B people are of working age. 3B are working. Most of them want a job that earns them a living. 1.3B have one. Only 13% are engaged. Almost nobody has a job that fits them. Humanity creates a $100T world economy, running at a fraction of its capacity. If everybody had a job that fitted them, everyone would be much happier and humanity would be creating many times more value than today.
Increasing smartphone penetration and new infrastructures like cloud computing and big data analytics can make tailored jobs for every person on earth a reality. We are at the beginning of a revolution in strengths finding, education, matchmaking, HR and the creation of opportunities in a long-tail labor market.
Imagine the 3B working people getting jobs they love, capitalizing on their unique skills, talents and passions, being matched in teams with people they enjoy working with, doing meaningful work. How much more value would they create than the unhappy mismatched workforce we have today? A doubling of value creation is for sure far below the real number, but already that adds $100T value to the world. If the job providers would charge 20% commission on the incomes people earned through their services, this would be $40T in revenues. Innovation for good jobs as a service is a narrative that opens the door to truly mind-boggling growth markets, where companies will compete to leverage the value of people.
The low-hanging fruit: the most undervalued people. An example of that is people with “coolabilities”, enhanced abilities that co-occur with disabilities. It is becoming well-known that some people with autism have an incredible sense for managing detail. This is a coolability that can make them into superior software engineers, for example. An innovative service can screen the demography for talent, train them in ways that fit their minds and find payed work that they can do better than almost any other engineer. A startup with such an innovative GJAAS will easily raise the value of people who earn zero dollars today to the top percentile of the workforce. It should be a good business. Very many disabling conditions come with coolabilities that have not been researched, even less explored by entrepreneurs. More about that in the article “A New Talent Market: “Coolabilities”, Enhanced Abilities in Disabling Conditions”.
So not only is GJAAS the largest market waiting to happen, it is also a commercial market where companies will compete to serve the most undervalued people, in most cases people who earn below average. Therefore, GJAAS is an industry that earns money on restoring a middle-class economy and keeping it in a great shape.
