Rethinking Business Models: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal

Rethinking value in the digital age

Author

Jess Price
June 29, 2026

Welcome to the 20th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.

Table of Contents

Jess’ Monthly Reflection

When I reluctantly chose a job title, I went with Chief Vision Officer because I knew a huge part of my job would be helping people envision a different future. For two and a half years, this role was easy. I knew humans created everything we currently do, so the logical conclusion was that we could do the same.

But then I researched the May and June editions of this Moonlit Minds Journal.

For the first time, I've started to doubt whether we can collectively build a better future. One where people don't have jobs that leave them anxious, depressed and off work for nine months - the reason Paradigm Makers exists. Or where people aren't excluded because of characteristics they never chose, like disability, the colour of their skin, where they were born, their gender or who they love. This is not me giving up. Instead, it's me choosing to say the quiet part out loud.

I'm not the first person to attempt to build a company that stands for something real. There was the one that wanted to make the world more open and connected, or the one that promised to do no evil. But two decades later, both have abandoned these human pursuits in favour of something else: growth at any cost.

Tackling the "money" side of the future has always filled me with dread because I'm not naive about the power that comes with it. Money, as the song goes, makes the world go round. It's also the thing that occupies way too much space in my brain right now. Yet even this motivation isn't enough for me to compromise what I'm attempting to build.

Which brings me to the topic of this month's edition: business models.

While this might sound like an easy topic to explore, the more I dug, the more complex the web of business models became. It turns out that business models are vague, without a universal definition. According to Strategyzer, the reason is that we have an intuitive understanding of the business model’s purpose (how a company makes money). But this vagueness is problematic.

So to simplify a complex and very confusing topic, this edition will be using Strategyzer's definition of a business model: 'a representation of how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value." I specifically chose this definition because, unlike others, it doesn’t directly mention profit (even though revenue streams are present in their Business Model Canvas (BMC) - a tool I love!).

Right now, Paradigm Makers creates value by taking risks others can't. How Paradigm Makers delivers and captures value is a little more complex. That’s why this edition is going to look a little different. Rather than attempting to create a broad proposal for design principles for the new paradigm, we are going to identify how I can turn the 2075 vision into reality. That vision is a world where invisible systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where we need it.

Enjoy June's Strawberry moon,

Jess Price

Founder & Chief Vision Officer

P.S. This edition, and a conversation with a friend, also helped me realise I need a break from the Moonlit Minds Journal. I'm not sure how long the break will be, but there are a few other writing opportunities I'm excited to explore, and I don't have time to do both. It will definitely be back though!

EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; citations included. This is not meant to be a complete summary. Case studies were chosen for their enduring legacy.

A Brief History of Business Models

In the mini Blue Moon edition, I mentioned that business models are a surprisingly complex topic because the concept lacks theoretical grounding in economics or business studies. Without that grounding, it’s difficult to gather an accurate historical summary of the most popular business models of each era. So instead, since the point of a business model is to identify value, we'll look at the value created, delivered and captured by five successful companies across history. You'll recognise some of the names, but all have shaped what we consider valuable today.

Pre-Industrial (before 1760): Value from controlling who can access scarce resources

The Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), was the world's first 'modern' limited liability and publicly traded company, creating value through a monopoly. In 1602, the Dutch Republic amalgamated six companies, granting a monopoly in all sea-borne trade with Asia. Throughout the 1600's, the VOC dominated the European nutmeg, pepper and cinnamon trades, producing astronomical profits for shareholders. That value relied on economic and military domination - exploiting Asian craft and trade while forcibly extracting wealth and labour. After almost two centuries of brutal extraction from colonised and enslaved peoples, the company was dissolved by the Dutch government in 1799. By one estimate in today's terms, the VOC would be worth around $7.4 trillion, making it the largest company in history.

First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): Value from owning an idea and licensing it

Between 1775 and 1800, Boulton & Watt delivered value by selling a steam engine that used far less fuel than its predecessor. In 1769, James Watt patented his improved engine but lacked the capital and facilities to exploit it. Matthew Boulton had both, so the two formed a partnership that dominated the steam engine industry until 1800. Value came from the legal monopoly provided by the patent through royalties on each engine, plus patent enforcement litigation. While the pair played a fundamental role in the Industrial Revolution (both were members of the Lunar Society), Watt has been criticised for using patents as a tool to suppress competitors. Consequently, Boulton and Watt kept prices high and prevented others from producing cheaper or better steam engines, hampering capital accumulation and slowing economic growth.

Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914): Value from making more, cheaper and faster

In 1913, Ford's assembly line provided value by reducing costs, raising wages and putting cars within reach of the masses. The moving assembly line used a conveyor to bring the product to the worker, rather than the worker to the product, building a car step by step down a line. The process reduced the time to build a Model T from 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes. But the work was boring and strictly timed, so workers left. To keep them, Henry Ford more than doubled the daily wage to $5 and cut the workday to 8 hours. It was predicted to bankrupt the company. Instead, the opposite happened: everyone wanted to work at Ford, an extra shift could be added, and the Model T's price fell from $825 to $260, putting it within reach of even more people. This legacy lives on as Fordism: a system of mass production that advanced capitalism.

Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006): Value from owning the interface between two sides

Amazon's value began in 1994, when Jeff Bezos began selling books out of his garage on the new World Wide Web. Bezos saw books as an easy entry point into e-commerce, with a plan to expand into a marketplace rivalling traditional department and independent stores. Initially inventory-free, after Amazon went public in 1997, it began building warehouses across the USA and eventually the world. Through the 2000s, it partnered with independent third-party sellers (expanding the marketplace), launched a cloud computing suite (Amazon Web Services), and introduced a membership bundle offering two-day shipping and entertainment options (Amazon Prime). This created a flywheel model. Despite being one of the few internet companies to survive the dotcom bust, Amazon continues to face scrutiny over labour practices, monopoly claims and environmental impacts.

Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now): Value from selling expertise that has no product

While the Fourth Industrial Revolution has evolved into value through 'technofeudalism' and 'enshittification', the 2020s also tested Deloitte's 180-year reputation as a trusted advisor of experts. In 2025, University of Sydney academic Chris Rudge found an error in a Deloitte report that referenced a "specific and unlikely publication". The report, commissioned by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations for AUD $440,000, was an independent assurance review of the system used to penalise welfare recipients who missed obligations. After an initial non-denial, Deloitte admitted it used AI, replaced the report, apologised and partially refunded the government. The incident reignited a long-running debate about government reliance on external advisors and the role of consultants in an AI future.

What this reveals 

The world's first company set a standard that remains 424 years later: value is created by one party, delivered to a second, and captured by a third. Through this lens:

  • VOC's value was created by enslaved and colonised producers, delivered to European consumers who received goods and spices at unprecedented scale, and captured by shareholders through dividends.

  • Boulton & Watt's value was created by the wider field of steam invention, delivered to industrialists who got cheaper, more efficient power and captured by the partnership, which took a share of every customer's fuel savings.

  • Ford's value was created by assembly-line workers, delivered to the mass consumer and captured by the firm through productivity gains.

  • Amazon's value was created by third-party sellers and warehouse labour, delivered to customers as convenience and low cost, and captured by the platform that owns the interface between the two.

  • Deloitte's value was created by junior staff, the client's own data and AI, delivered to the government as an 'independent assurance review', and captured through a premium fee justified by 180 years of reputation - until the undisclosed AI use revealed how little of that reputation the work itself contained.

Across four centuries, a pattern emerged. The party that captures the value is rarely the one that creates it, and never the one left carrying the cost. So how can something designed to create, deliver and capture value do so across all parties?

THE LOGIC WE HAVE INHERITED

The Value Defaults We No Longer Notice

We've built a system that distributes value unequally across the parties who create, deliver and capture it. Owners, shareholders and intermediaries capture the most value, while the knowledge, trust and environment they rely on to create it are treated as inputs. Success is measured by what's captured. Everything else is left off the ledger, or treated as an expense to be minimised, which is how we ended up with an economy built on extraction. The three rules below are the defaults we no longer notice. One governs how value is created, one how it's delivered and one how it's captured.

Treat creation as a cost to minimise

Creation is the work of turning inputs into something worth more than it cost. That's reasonable, but the way we do it is built to maximise what's captured, regardless of what it does to people or the planet. So the people and systems doing the creating get treated as the cheapest possible input:

  • If global labour income share remained at the 2004 levels, labour income in 2024 would have been US$2.4 trillion larger (ILO, 2024).

  • Mental ill-health costs the global economy over $1 trillion annually in lost productivity (WHO, 2025).

  • Global extraction of natural resources has tripled during the past five decades and is projected to increase another 60% by 2060 (UNEP, 2024).

Deliver the benefit, push out the cost

Delivery should serve creation, receiver and capturer all at once. In reality, it serves to capture first, and the cost lands on whoever creates or receives the value, or on a third party who was never considered in the first place:

  • Electronic waste is projected to rise to 82 billion kilograms in 2030, up from 62 billion kilograms in 2022, driven by shorter product lifecycles and limited repair options (UN).

  • Shrinkflation means paying more for less: since 2000, the per-100g cost of Palmolive Gold soap has risen roughly 90% even as pack sizes shrank (Choice, 2025).

  • By 2030, U.S data centres could contribute to nearly 1300 deaths a year, a public health burden of more than $20 billion annually (Han, Wu, Li, Wierman, 2024).

Capture as much value as possible

Capture has become the whole point. It's what shows up on a profit and loss statement, and the P&L is how we define success. Record growth signals achievement, no matter what it costs to get there, which rewards the accumulation of wealth and the destruction underneath it:

  • Between 1978-2024, top CEO compensation increased 1,094%, compared with a 26% increase for a typical worker (Economic Policy Institute, 2025).

  • In 2025, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook) and Tesla collectively reported $315 billion in U.S profits, paying just 4.9% of that amount in federal corporate tax (ITEP, 2026) compared to the Corporate Tax Rate of 21%.

  • Intangible assets represented 92% of S&P 500 market value in 2025, compared to 17% in 1975 (Ocean Tomo, 2025), widening the gap between who creates value and who owns it.

Redesign at the Level of Meaning

Today's metrics only measure one kind of value: what's captured. Creation is recorded as an expense, and delivery is judged on financial return alone. It leads back to Robert F Kennedy's 1968 observation that Gross National Product measures everything "...except that which makes life worthwhile..."

We inherited the assumption that financial reward is the only value worth capturing. And whatever it costs people or the planet to create that value doesn't matter, as long as profit outweighs loss. This is the system working as designed. Building business models that account for those hidden costs requires a different question: how do we make the hidden costs visible, so that a company's success is tied to the value it creates and delivers, not only the value it captures?

CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW

Principle Generation Approach: AI-assisted possible futures, based on a NotebookLM containing sources related to the Brain Economy and Paradigm Makers 5 Essential Elements.

Designing Value for Humans

Tim O'Reilly believes the key to lasting business success is to create more value than you capture. Paradigm Makers agrees, but the practical reality is much harder. We're only beginning to define our own version of value based on the 2075 vision, and we're not the first to try. In 2022, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard did something almost no company has: he made 'Earth our only shareholder’. He reasoned that if Patagonia could "do the right thing while making enough to pay the bills", it might influence other businesses and change the system along the way. That's the gap Paradigm Makers is trying to work out for itself.

That's where the Brain Economy comes in. Through the lens of Brain Capital, value no longer comes from ignoring the hidden costs. Instead, value comes from the health and skills of the human brain and the ecosystems that sustain it.

Based on this work and Paradigm Makers' Essential Elements, here are five design principles for how we'll attempt to create, deliver and capture value.

People: From Human Capital to Brain Capital

Old Paradigm: People are treated as machine-like productivity metrics
New Paradigm: People are treated as core economic assets

The Flagship Study on the Global Brain Capital Index frames this as five shifts: from productivity to purpose, from health as a side concern to health as core infrastructure, from formal skills to neurocognitive assets like creativity, from individual effort to brain-friendly system design and from chasing growth to building resilience (pg 7).

Question: How can we move the human role from productivity to primary infrastructure?

Innovation: From Disruption to Cognition

Old Paradigm: Technological disruption
New Paradigm: Higher-order cognitive, emotional and adaptive functions

Instead of treating technological disruption as the main source of innovation, we reframe it through brain skills and our capacity to invent a ‘new recipe’ under pressure rather than follow a ‘known one’. These are the "non-technical skills ... often overlooked in formal education" that have an outsized impact on performance in creative and analytical thinking, resilience and flexibility (pg 6).

Question: In an era of deep uncertainty, how do we move from relying on technological disruption to brain skills?

Technology: From Replacement to Augmentation

Old Paradigm: Human replacement
New Paradigm: Human augmentation

Technology shouldn't just be a way to squeeze out more productivity. Used well, it augments the skills that make us human rather than replacing them. When technology is designed around the human skills it can't replicate, those skills become the advantage as raw materials, machines or data can't match them.

Question: How do we reframe technology as a tool that lets humans use their highest-value skills?

Economics: From Extractive to Regenerative

Old Paradigm: Value is extracted
New Paradigm: Value is regenerative

The brain economy reframes our most valuable resources away from oil, data or financial capital toward our cognitive and emotional capacity. At the UN General Assembly's Brain Economy Summit, Professor Rym Ayadi described this as "valuing human intelligence alongside machine intelligence." It means redesigning incentives and redefining success beyond financial measures to accumulate wealth towards the future it makes possible.

Question: How might we move from short-term financial return toward a model that funds the future we want?

Norms: From Individualism to Interdependence

Old Paradigm: Success is an individual achievement
New Paradigm: Success is based on collective wellbeing

Shifting success from individual achievement to collective wellbeing needs different metrics. Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness, an idea dating back to its 1729 legal code that stated: "if the government cannot create happiness (dekidk) for its people, there is no purpose for the government to exist" (pg 8). If citizens' wellbeing guided decisions, they'd have to weigh factors that stay hidden today.

Question: If we measured success by collective wellbeing, how successful would we be right now?

How these principles fit together

These five principles don't slot neatly into create, deliver and capture. Instead, they reshape all three at once by changing what we treat as valuable in the first place. People, Innovation, and Norms change what we count as created value. People, Technology, and Norms change how that value is delivered and to whom. Economics and norms change what we allow businesses to capture. Together, they move business models away from capturing value regardless of hidden cost, toward making brain capital visible. By one 'estimate', prioritising brain capital over extractive metrics could generate $6.2 trillion in annual global GDP gains. When combined with the USD $2.7 trillion in economic, health and environmental benefits of a circular economy for food alone, there’s alot of value to capture from a new approach.

DESIGNING 2075: WHAT HAPPENS IF WE START NOW

Scenario Generation Approach: AI-assisted scenario, based on the 5 design principles proposed above and Paradigm Makers’ 2075 vision of a world where our systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where it's needed.

The Design of Intentional Value

I selfishly picked business models as this month's topic to help me identify a viable business model for Paradigm Makers. In the ~30 hours it's taken me to research, write and edit this edition, I'm happy to announce I've found some clarity.

Paradigm Makers creates value through brain skills that allow us to invent 'new recipes' in circumstances where 'known recipes' fail.

We deliver value in partnership with human intelligence and technology, where technology provides the structure. We do this by running experiments on how we can:

  • use technology, like AI, to augment, not replace, human intelligence

  • translate theoretical or abstract concepts buried in reports, academic papers and white papers into practical tools that create new ways to work

  • conduct needlessly detailed historical research to understand why we experience the outcomes we do.

We capture value through regenerative stewardship, replacing extractive metrics with Brain Capital metrics. We do this by:

  • Building enduring assets: turning experiments into tools that increase the Brain Capital of our partners.

  • Measuring vitality: tracking success through a 'Vitality Ledger' that sits alongside traditional financial documents.

  • Reinvesting profits: functioning as a steward-owned entity that anchors capital back into the community to support the resilience of the whole local ecosystem.

I haven't worked out how to do this yet, but for the first time, I can see the shape of it.

Until next time,

Jess

P.S.

P.P.S The concept of business models didn’t evolve in isolation. If you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:

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