Students of strategic management have been taught for generations how to gain competitive advantage to optimize profits. The same techniques have been used by Big Tech firms to acquire dominant market positions at the expense of society’s wellbeing. Today, fixing a system that rewards opportunistic behavior, instead of prioritizing societal values, seems an impossible task. In this podcast Dovev Lavie, Professor at the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University, identifies several problems that our current economic system has created, including wealth concentration, economic inequality, overconsumption, and the abuse of natural resources. He then proposes design principles on which a new economic system should be built to overcome these challenges and promote sustainability and cooperation within communities.

The flaws of the modern economic system in the Western world have become pervasive with the dominance of the Big Tech firms, while antitrust regulation and enforcement struggle to restrain these firms. We cannot blame the Big Tech firms for mastering the rules of an economic system that allows profit maximization to override societal values such as sustainability and well-being. What is the root cause of these challenges, and how can we cope with them?

In his recent book, The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges (Routledge), Dovev Lavie (Bocconi University) offers a bold solution to societal grand challenges that have taken a toll on humanity. Bocconi Knowledge, courtesy of the author and the publisher, publishes an excerpt from the book.