The Tinker Fund is a working title for a prototype concept proposal being developed in collaboration with Tinker|Bristol, a manufacturing incubator and makerspace as a new approach to superfiduciary R&D.

The main idea is that evergreen superfiduciaries need to have their finger on the pulse beat of prosperity, and the changes taking place in the economy that are creating the need and the opportunity for co-creative, collaborative and evolutionary adaptation to change.

Superfiduciaries investing in cash flows in order to generate the cash flows they need to write the checks they have a fiduciary duty to write, today and everyday, need to ride the ebb-and-flow of changes in the network architecture of the economy and the technology choices of the people in order to properly steward the funds entrusted to their care.

University laboratories are one place superfiduciaries can look to see these changes in their earliest, formative stages.

Community makerspaces – and the maker movement – may prove to be another.

A makerspace is a community space that provides safe access to tools and equipment to individuals who have a personal passion to tinker with technology, broadly understood as artifacts of human ingenuity and creativity applied to the problems of everyday living.

What better barometer of impending change in the structure of the economy than the personal passions of individuals willing to speculate their own time and limited treasure to tinker with an idea they have for making our lives better through innovations in technology in some small – or not so small – way?

We see these makerspaces as potentially becoming the new garage of the next Silicon Valley, the affordable spaces where enterprising individuals, working with limited means, pursue ideas that aspire to become industries!

Consider these FAQs.

Q. What fueled Silicon Valley?

A. Venture Capital.

Q. What funded Venture Capital in fueling Silicon Valley?

A. Superfiduciaries.

Of course, in the early 1970s, when garages in Silicon Valley were first bursting with the ideas that became the industry we know as Information Technology, superfduciaries did not self-identitfy – and were not other-identified – as “superfiduciaries”.  At that time, they were known only as plain, old ordinary fiduciaries.  Institutional, as opposed to individuals, in the Wall Street system of securities trading that did dominate then, and still does dominate now, our thinking about what is possible in the way of financing for enterprise.

It is these Institutional Investors who were tapped by enterprising venture capitalists to fund them in funding enterprising individuals working in their parents’ garage to bring new applications of the digital signal processing technologies first developed through Defense Department R&D into the wider privately commercial economy.

Government taxpayer-supported funding, especially for Defense purposes, long has and continues to be an important ingredient in the funding of inquiring minds who give birth to new ideas that have become so many of the industries we take for granted today, from railroads to semiconductors.

This is a proven, reliable way to support an adaptively evolving economy.

Silicon Valley-style venture capital picked up where Defense funding left off, in the digital space, providing for-profit funding for projects evolving out of Defense research that had private, not military, applications.

As the Institutional Investors in the Wall Street system go evergreen, and increasingly self-identify as superfiduciaries with the super power to negotiate with enterprise, directly, that is a change in the financial sector of our economy today that is creating the need and the opportunity for a new strategy for directing these dollars into new enterprises and new ideas that will become our new industries.

The Tinker Fund concept is being developed to meet that need, and profit from that opportunity.

The concept is simple. Incubator/makerspaces like Tinker|Bristol raise funds from superfiduciaries to support their makerspace activities, and to invested selectively in those entetprising individuals who come into their makerspaces with promising new ideas that aspire to transform existing industries and technology choices – or to create entirely new ones, from scratch, following the proven pattern of Silicon Valley Venture Capital, but with an evergreen twist.

Where Venture Capital is really just a farm system for Wall Street, seeking to incubate new ventures that will grow rapidly into new IPOs and new listed companies whose shares can then be traded in the Wall Street system, superfiduciary R&D will seek to receive agreed shares in new cash flows from new enterprises that will grow over time, if and as that enterprise establishes and expands its relevance in an evolving evolving economy.

The endgame is the same. Only the pathways will be changed.

Enterprise will have a new choice:

1. it can choose to be funded through the Wall Street system, and be governed by the values of expected growth in future valuation that drives that system; or
2. it can choose to be funded through the superfiduciary system, and be governed by the values they negotiate with their superfiduciary collaborators.

A new choice that is radically responsive to the needs and the opportunities of these times in which we now live.

Radical in the Latin sense of “going to the root” of finance as income security for individuals.

Radical in the Copernican sense of giving birth to new experts with new expertise, and a new way of being in this world.