The 97% Economy

Nico Baken had an unusual double life. For years he was a professor at Delft University of Technology and, at the same time, a strategist at KPN, the Dutch telecom company. A man with one foot in science and one foot in a corporation, which may be why he refused to see the economy the way both worlds usually draw it: as a stack of separate sectors, each with its own conferences, its own jargon, its own ministry desk.

Baken looked at the economy the way a network engineer looks at a telephone exchange. Not "what is each sector?" but "how is everything connected?" He gave his idea a name that never became fashionable but should have: trans-sector innovation. And with his PhD researcher Edgar van Boven, himself a KPN telecom architect for twenty-five years, he started measuring what the sector-stack picture hides.