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August 12, 2004
Hacking vs. Research
Posted by Ross Mayfield
BusinessWeek interviews
Howard Rheingold on his
Cooperation Project. He describes what’s happening as the creation of a new economic system, the reaction of record and movie companies (
Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies.) and also offers a different model for exploring innovation:
…If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it.
Q: A focus group on steroids.
A: This would be more like ethnography, where you let them loose and watch what they do. If you want to think out of the box about innovation, let’s not put all of our bets on 50-year-old PhDs in laboratories. We now have dispersed the means of individual and collective innovation throughout the world…
Comments (1)
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1. Tim Keller on August 12, 2004 2:00 PM writes...
I see a lot of effort directed at decrying the state of affairs ("there they go again!") without much hope of changing the state of the system. The incumbents have an advantage in the balance of power, but that can be overcome if we continue to learn how to harness network effects & self-organization. We're only beginning to unravel how that works. When we do, they better look out because the day of the dinosaurs is almost over.
Tim
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The Self Organization Project
"we've got math on our side"