Tempted to think about what a business algorithm might look like, we are supposed to talk about at Tim O'Reilley's Web 2.0 Expo at Berlin in November, I just invented one, translating, as it were, the general network synthesis algorithm into a specific business one.
Check it out here:
http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/ABusinessAlgorithm.pdf
I took care to preface it with three good reasons to do it in the first place: (1) cybernetics unsolved problems as recalled by Warren McCulloch, (2) Heinz von Foerster's invitation to do a communication formalism without any communicabilia entering into the formula, and (3), because there is no way to do it without it, a recall of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.
Yet, indeed, the algorithm is nothing but a further look at what should be done in the not too far future, spelling all the variables out, action (overflow), talk (culture form), group (number), grid (order), and society (re-entry), and then looking at what happens at the the-entry-levels mating, gaming, tying, switching, and knowing.
Imagine any one distinction being re-entered as a nonlinear oscillator, all of them doing continuously their work of nonlinear prediction, and producing thereby, only noticed by the communication going on itself, the statistical basis for the space of possible businesses to be imagined, created, explored, and exploited.
The business algorithm is a many-sided form consisting of eigen-functions producing their eigen-behavior. Communicabilia are lacking, yet are constantly attracted, since without them, the form of business would not gain the visibility, tractability, and accountability, we need to infer the distinctions playing its recurrence and iteration.
I have recently begun to think into what this sort of business algorithm would mean if we were to imagine alongside it the democratic(networked) ownership of companies. If we can construct robust enough alorithms, which manage, as you say, to establish a "nonlinear oscillator" and then function alongside it, we can allow for the establishment of novel and exciting probabilites and, therein, businesses.
I imagine a community where users agree to participate in the establishment and decision making of a company, and offer an amount of money toward a common pool, and then they begin and declare their interests/expertise and intentions. (do we want to make toy trucks or rice fields?) The algorithm then takes care of the initial gatekeeping, goal-setting, and can make this process transparent to the user, offering supporting evidence and micro-decisions and presentations along the way. The decisions and the discussions to be made at, say "the establishment of a company" would be presented, voted for, and the business would proceed on the outcomes of a linear series of these "shared decisions".
I can see a new possibility of engaging in the mobilization of capital through the use and discovery of the function of the network as supporting and enabling activity in the world. Aids and Charities could be good candidates to be established as participatory companies, as they are familiar, at least with the notion of the network providing the pool of capital. The notion of "good" is arrived at communually, and also personally, but the action of "good" is not. If we, however, understand the power of the networks, which can both maintain the form and simultaneously disestablish the heirachies of decision-making through an informed participatory design, we have an interface which takes its place in the world not as a media object, but as activity and production.
It is not until we "put our money with our mouth is" that the real power of the network can be harnessed. I think we are dying to "put our money where our mouth is", and are fascinated with the mere form of the network at present, but we haven't had the technology nor vision to test the notion of who it is who can carry the decisions of company boards/possible businesses/future directions, etc. Your business algorithm appeals to me as it broaches this question of management-style decisions being made by informed and participatory communities.