Experience shows that nascent markets are often chaotic, fragmented, and uncoordinated. The various players are hamstrung by an asymmetry of information - knowledge tends to pool in isolated locations, rather than flowing freely. That in turn constrains the flow of capital. The money side doesn't know what a good investment looks like, and the product or service delivery side doesn't know what the appropriate sources of money are.

The first steps to solving such problems are maps, marketplace overviews that categorize the roles of the various players. Collective Intelligence co-founder Mark Beam has been mapping the various capital marketplaces we've studied, which we've separated into Social Capital, Appropriate Technology, and Clean Technology. (High Technology is next.) Download them by clicking on the links below. We'd love to have your comments and criticisms: Email your thoughts to Mark here.

• View the Social Capital Map: the Virtue Marketplace - an operating system for an open source economy. (revised March 15). Or, download a printable version of the Social Capital Map, broken into three GIF files, and stored in a ZIP file. And if any of those terms are unfamiliar, just click here, here, then here, and print each page separately. Finally, to see the Social Capital map in an editable form, download an evaluation copy of Inspiration software at www.inspiration.com and download this file.
  
• An early version of the Appropriate Technology map is here, in Adobe PDF format (download Acrobat Reader here, if need be).
  
• A full version of the Clean Technology (CleanTech) map is now available, in three separate, printable PDFs; click here, here, and here.

Maps From an Earlier Time

These maps of the retail supply chain (an earlier focus of Collective Intelligence) were developed by Moonwatch Media www.Moonwatchmedia.com, the leading retail e-business consultancy, with the input of top
e-business execs at Bristol Myers and other firms.

They were sent along in response to the 8/30 edition of the Collective Intelligence newsletter by Roland Faubert, a 30 year retail veteran who leads Moonwatch's research. Because they deal with a particular industry's supply chain, they are amazingly detailed and complex. Click on a map to see a larger version, or download a .pdf file for all of the detail.

Download B2B Road Map (.pdf)

Download CPFR Map (.pdf)

If you've got a map of your industry or supply chain you'd like to contribute to the collective intelligence effort, please send them to kevin@collectiveintelligence.net We're building a network where we all get smarter quicker.