While most Internet users are just getting used to Web 2.0, today’s online pioneers are helping Web 3.0 (whatever it might become) begin to take shape. The kind of creativity and innovation they cultivate is exactly what technology, business, and, indeed, the global economy desperately need right now.
Being a pioneer -- a term that for most of history has meant “the guys with the arrows in their backs” -- generally has been risky, scary, and fairly lonely business. That’s because historically it’s been difficult for many people to enter truly new territory all at once.
But given the way the Internet has evolved, it’s now actually easier to scout out some of the most exciting new territory when you’re part of a crowd (or at least a posse). That’s because two (or many) heads aren’t just smarter than one -- they’re also collectively more creative, adventurous, and powerful. Plus, it’s pretty hard to stop a surging creative mob with just a few arrows.
It may sound as if I’m talking about an invasion, but actually I’m talking about creation. Today’s online pioneers are collectively creating new territory, even if they appear to be working “alone” on unrelated projects.
The good news is that creative people don’t start from scratch. They take existing online creations, ideas, or observations and discuss them, expand upon them, combine them, rip them apart, turn them upside-down or inside-out… And that’s how innovation happens. Even projects that don’t seem to “work” aren’t failures, since they’re potential fodder for new creations.
It makes less sense than ever before to put your precious energy into locking down the raw materials of innovation in the name of protection. You’ve got to ask, “What do we really need to protect?”
Many businesses and individual creators use intellectual property law primarily to thwart competitors (real or imagined), rather than to amplify the benefits of innovation. I believe this approach is not just backwards, but truly harmful.
That’s why I embrace Creative Commons licensing: a legal alternative to copyright that lets creators easily mark creative works with the freedoms they want them to carry. Next week, my company plans to publish a series of “business mashups” that anyone can download, remix, and use to combine popular business software packages in more useful and customized ways.
The mashups will be offered free of charge under a Creative Commons license that allows users to freely create and share derivate works, as well as showcase their efforts. With this approach, our online community is collectively much more creative than we could ever be.
Being a control freak is no longer sound business strategy. So try letting people play with and share what you have to offer. They aren’t robotic “users” -- they’re potential collaborators and evangelists. This approach has far greater business, economic, and social value. Plus, it’s much more fun.
— René Bonvanie, Senior VP Worldwide Marketing, Partner Programs, and Online Services, Serena Software Inc.
Groups of people are often known as committees. Unfortunately not the best place to be creative.
Heard of the 'Mythical Man Month' of course, the real innovators in the world are individuals, more people doesn't mean more ideas.
A group might be formed to do the development, but don't expect anything more than a mushup from the committee.
Even with GPL, control of the development is not given away, but held centrally for other users to feed back improvements for inclusion. Loosing control is allowing an application to fork which is non-productive, wasting effort going in different directions and loosing possible improvements.
Forgotten people allow a true innovation to be squandered. "Pioneers" are the people who history remembers and are usually the people who commercialise an idea.
Who remembers the inventor of the blue diode? He earned zip for his invention, but the company he worked for got the patent.
I agree. Despite the fact that
sharing and collaboration help to shape an innovation, the intellectual property law has played a major role that
hold back many people from doing so. This reminds me of those articles about
copyright wars and innovation, one of which can be found at business week on the article on "are the copyrightwars chilling innovations?"
There
are endless examples of how innovations have been born from the freedoms of
people empowerment from the famouse Linux to Google. But,
why do people keep come up with an endless intellectual property Law? This
might be answered by the fact that everyone wants to be recognized as pioneer
when they invent something or be acknowledged on their hard works. However, there
are issues like people steeling ideas or conflict from having the same idea. Nevertheless, it is very unfortunate to think that the good intention of
a legal protection has an effect on the development of education systems and
R&D.
Reminds me of the movie the Saint, where the Cold Fusion invention was a gift to the world rather than trying to control something that powerful for strictly personal gain.
Rene, great post indeed. I've been wondering why so few people from a business perspective have been embracing social production and creative commons. The standard response of the 'pro copyright/patent tightening' lobby is always that their strict control is better for the market. Well for their market in the short term maybe, but certainly not for innovation in the long run. The distinction here is not between market and state-control, but between free development and control by copyrights and patents.
Because Fluid, in contrast to your statements that the internet would be "uncontrolled" and "anonymous", I would pose that the opposite is true. Control over access, content and personal information is much more prevalent online than it is offline. Think about it: in order to even use the internet, you have to agree with the terms of use of an ISP. Every piece of software you will use requires the same process, and all of them by then already know your IP address.
The idea that control is good in case of the internet, is too often uncritically taken for granted. Let's not forget that many industries were able to develop in situations that would be considered piracy today. The Hollywood film industry was founded by 'independents' who fled the east coast to circumvent the film technology patents enforced by Edison. These 'pirates' built upon existing technology to develop the most dominant film industry worldwide––which ironically is the most vicious watchdog against piracy today.
By the way: most this argument is indebted to the work of Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons.
Well your concerns are quite valid and true due to very nature of Internet as a platform which is highly distributed, uncontrolled, anonymous, widely available and easily accessible. Its so diverse that thinking of "universal co-operation" for creativity and innovation may simply not be possible due to heterogeneous humans in every sense who are doing so called co-operation for various reasons. Some just want to share knwoledge, some want to learn, some want to prove a point, some want to make money out of it, some want to pass time, some want to destroy, etc...you can never predict!
But what I believe is this co-operation for creativity and innovation will very well work in a particular context that is well defined. For example organization or group level or wikis, forums, social groups, etc where you define the context and its rules to certain level like the purpose of Group and you regulate it to certain level using moderators and recognize the good contributors or co-operators by giving them rankings, points, perks etc. And at the same time you can ban any unwanted soul from the group. In such enviorment you can give right credit to true pioneers of a particular idea or innovation. Obviously if its an open community somebody else can replicate, reuse or transform your idea as we dont have such regulation at whole Internet or WWW level. But that thing will also become reality slowly as Semantic web and autonomus web agents will bring more regulation to internet and will enable wider contexts and meaningful web socities.
Indeed, this notion of co-operating creatively instead of competing, sounds like it would be ideal. It seems to me though that some basic elements were not been thought or at least not brought up in this blog.
Firstly, how do you define/accredit the true pioneer from all those whose ideas were used in order for him to make the breakaway? Are we speaking individually or by companies?
If individually is the case (and to companies in a more general sense), then another problem arises. In order for these "models" to work effectively a good reflection upon a factor is required. That is the factor of human nature. Surely, this sounds easy yet is the most challenging problem of all. For all failing systems out there I'm confident that no consideration on this matter was processed properly.
Even though, I'm not yet at a level where I can fully apply philosophy to socio-economical and technological issues, I can surely speculate some malfunctions.
It all comes down to, are humans meant to cooperate creatively or if they're given that chance of "freedom" will they abuse it for their own benefits? If the second occurs, which is the most likely, then won't that prevail from people sharing their ideas?
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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