section 01 | framework
The sequence.
The mechanism.
The Migration of Value Framework explains how technological change repeatedly reshapes where value is created, captured and sustained. A four-phase model explaining how value redistributes when capability becomes abundant. Built from historical observation across five centuries, not from first principles.
First Edition | Jason Dauphinee | 2026
on this page
01 The Thesis
02 The Definition
03 The Sequence
04 The Four Phases
05 Open Questions
06 Methodology
07 Scholarly Context
01 The thesis
When capability becomes abundant, value migrates.
This is not a prediction. It is an observation derived from five centuries of economic and social disruption. When a technology makes a previously scarce capability structurally abundant, the organizations and individuals that built advantage on the scarcity of that capability face a structural shift. Their advantage does not simply erode. It becomes the floor, not the ceiling. The capability that once differentiated them becomes the baseline expectation.
Value does not disappear. It moves. It migrates toward whatever cannot yet be replicated at scale. The question this framework asks is not whether migration will occur. It is where value is moving, and what survives the transition.
02 The definition
A working definition.
The framework required a definition precise enough to be falsifiable and honest enough to acknowledge what it does not yet resolve.
the first edition definition
When technology makes a previously scarce capability structurally abundant, value migrates toward new sources of meaningful differentiation. Technology is the perturbation. The environment is the medium. Adaptation is the mechanism. Differentiation is the engine.
This framework should be understood as an integrative explanatory framework that synthesizes observations from economics, sociology, psychology, evolutionary thinking, and history into a unified descriptive sequence.
Two terms in this definition carry deliberate ambiguity that has not been resolved: what constitutes “meaningful” differentiation, and whether differentiation is what humans fundamentally value or whether it is a proxy for something deeper. These remain open questions. They are logged as such.
03 Causal Sequence
The complete causal chain.
The framework proposes a specific sequence of events. Each step follows from the previous. The sequence was derived from historical observation and refined through adversarial testing against three case studies. It is not a model of every disruption. It is a model of the specific class of disruption caused by the structural commoditization of capability.
Exhibit A
When a capability transitions from scarce to abundant, organizations that built advantage on its scarcity face a structural shift. Value does not disappear. It moves to what the capability cannot replace.
Fig. 1.0 — First Edition
The critical observation is that value migration is not the end of the sequence. It precedes a reorganization of power. Who captures the new differentiator, and whether that capture is distributed broadly or concentrated narrowly, determines the downstream social and economic consequences. The printing press produced distributed migration. Social media produced captured migration. The framework does not yet predict which outcome will follow a given disruption.
04 The Migration of Value Framework: Four Phases
The sequence expressed as phases.
The causal sequence above maps onto four observable phases. These phases are not equally weighted in time. The first three can unfold over decades or centuries. The fourth, once initiated, tends to accelerate.
01 - Capability Emerges
Condition: Scarcity Advantage: Maximal
A new capability exists but is not yet widely accessible. It may require specialized knowledge, expensive equipment, controlled access, or proximity to rare expertise. The organizations or individuals who possess it hold a genuine structural advantage. Scarcity is the source of that advantage, not the capability itself.
Mechanism: Access to the capability is the differentiator. The value is in possessing what others cannot yet possess.
02 - Capability Spreads
Condition: Diffusion Advantage: Eroding
The capability begins to diffuse through the environment. Access costs fall. Knowledge spreads. Tooling improves. The early holders of the capability attempt to defend their position through pricing, complexity, institutional gatekeeping, or legal means. These defences delay but do not reverse the diffusion. Competitive advantage begins to compress.
Mechanism: The window of advantage narrows. Speed of adoption by competitors determines how quickly the advantage erodes.
03 - Capability Commoditises
Condition: Abundance Advantage: Gone
The capability is now structurally abundant. It is accessible to most or all participants in the relevant environment. Possessing it confers no advantage. Lacking it is a disqualifier. The capability has shifted from a differentiator to a baseline expectation. Organizations still competing on the original capability are competing on a floor, not a ceiling.
Mechanism: The capability becomes table stakes. It is necessary but no longer sufficient. Competitive energy must now redirect.
04 - Value Migrates
Condition: Redistribution Advantage: Available to those who adapt
Value has moved. It now resides in whatever the commoditized capability cannot replace: judgment, context, trust, meaning, relationships, embodied experience, and institutional knowledge. The organizations and individuals who recognized the migration early, or who were structurally positioned to capture the new differentiator, hold a new advantage. The cycle does not end here. It begins again.
Mechanism: Adaptive reorganization determines who captures the new differentiator. This is the fork between distributed and captured migration.
05 Open Questions
What the framework has not resolved.
01 - Do humans value differentiation, or is differentiation a proxy for something more fundamental?
The framework proposes that value migrates toward new sources of meaningful differentiation. But this raises the question of whether differentiation is the end humans are seeking, or whether it is an instrument for something else: survival, belonging, status, meaning. If the latter, the framework may be describing a mechanism without fully identifying its telos.
02 - Does scarcity create value, or does it reveal value that already exists?
The framework treats scarcity as the condition that makes a capability a differentiator. But the historical cases raise a harder question: is the value a product of the scarcity, or does scarcity simply make visible a value that would exist regardless? The answer has significant implications for what happens after commoditisation, and whether the migration is toward genuinely new value or toward the re-emergence of suppressed value.
06 Methodology
How this framework was built.
The Migration of Value framework was not derived from existing theory. It emerged from observation and was tested adversarially before being formalized. The methodology was deliberate: select historical cases that challenge the framework rather than confirm it, apply a simulated interdisciplinary panel assuming the framework is wrong, log all criticisms in a formal register, and accept modifications only when supported by evidence from multiple independent cases.
Three historical stress tests were completed in sequence: the Printing Press (c.1450), the Quartz Crisis (1969), and the Steam Engine and Industrial Revolution (c.1760). Each produced a nine-stage analysis with a formal verdict: Supports, Mixed, or Complicates. A Complicates verdict strengthens the framework’s intellectual honesty. It is not the same as contradicts.
06 scholary context
The framework's primary contribution is the unified treatment of meaningful differentiation within a broader explanatory sequence of technological adaptation. Within the scope of the prior art reviewed, no existing framework integrates that mechanism into the explanatory sequence presented here.
| Scholar | Relationship | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Joseph Schumpeter | Partial overlap; different level of analysis | Creative destruction describes the macro-economic process by which innovation displaces established industries. The Migration of Value operates at the level of capability and human adaptation, not industry structure. Schumpeter explains what is destroyed. This framework addresses where value goes afterward, and why. |
| Clayton Christensen | Partial overlap; different level of analysis | Disruptive innovation describes a specific supply-side pattern in which lower-tier entrants capture mainstream markets by improving incrementally. The Migration of Value operates at a broader level, across multiple dimensions simultaneously, and addresses populations and communities, not only firms and markets. The two frameworks are not in conflict; they address different questions at different levels of analysis. |
| Karl Polanyi | Compatible; relevant for institutional resistance cases | Polanyi's double movement describes the tension between market expansion and social protection. The Migration of Value's account of institutional resistance at Stage 4 is structurally Polanyian: organised resistance to the collapse of a differentiator is not irrational. It is a proportional response to the disruption of embedded social value. Polanyi provides useful vocabulary for cases where the countermovements are the primary story. |
| Pierre Bourdieu | Compatible; most relevant for luxury and cultural capital cases | Bourdieu's field theory and concept of cultural capital describe how social distinction operates through the accumulation of recognised symbolic value. The framework's recognition-based definition of meaningful differentiation is structurally Bourdieusian: differentiation is social and contextual, not intrinsic. Readers analysing cases where cultural capital is the primary form of differentiation will find Bourdieu's vocabulary useful alongside this framework. |
| Adrian Slywotzky | Adjacent; different level of analysis | Value Migration (1995) uses the same phrase to describe the movement of economic and shareholder value between business designs as customer priorities change. The Migration of Value uses the phrase to describe a different phenomenon: the redistribution of value following technological abundance as humans adapt and new meaningful differentiation emerges. The frameworks share terminology but differ in unit of analysis, mechanism, scope, historical method, and emphasis on human adaptation. They are complementary rather than competing. |
What none of these frameworks address, and what this framework treats as central: the collapse and reconstruction of meaningful differentiation as a unified mechanism that operates simultaneously at the economic, psychological, social, and institutional levels.
A comprehensive review of adjacent literature, including areas of overlap, distinction, and potential redundancy, is documented in the companion publication, Prior Art Review: Related Work and Distinctions.
ON INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS
This framework makes no claim to being a complete theory of economic disruption. It is a descriptive model of a specific class of event. It has been tested against three historical cases and found to hold with qualifications. The qualifications are documented. The open questions are named. Where the framework cannot yet answer, it says so. That is the standard it holds itself to.