Innovation Isn't a Matter of Left or Right

[mgc1961]

Authors quickly find a certain predictability to many of the questions they encounter on a book tour. But a few weeks ago, during the second stop on the tour for my new book, I found myself being interviewed in front of a Seattle audience and responding to an opening question that I had never been asked before: “Are you a Communist?”

The question was intended as a joke, but like the best jokes, it played on the edges of an important and uncomfortable truth. I had just spent four years writing a book about the innovative power of open systems that work outside of or parallel to traditional market environments: the amateur scientists of the Enlightenment, university research labs, open source software platforms.

In my research, I analyzed 300 of the most influential innovations in science, commerce and technology — from the discovery of vacuums to the vacuum tube to the vacuum cleaner — and put the innovators of each breakthrough into one of four quadrants. First, there is the classic solo entrepreneur, protecting innovations in order to benefit from them financially; then the amateur individual, exploring and inventing for the love of it. Then there are the private corporations collaborating on ideas while simultaneously competing with one another. And then there is what I call the “fourth quadrant”: the space of collaborative, nonproprietary innovation, exemplified in recent years by the Internet and the Web, two groundbreaking innovations not owned by anyone.

There's more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/31every.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

[jtuck004]

1. This author might have gotten a little traction from acknowledging

the role government - ie taxpayer's money - played in all this innovation. The Internet and the Web, his last two examples, came about through military and university desires to connect and move data, and the web came from government investment in education and computers in another country.

This statement form the article "People are “investing” in others not for the promise of financial reward, but for the social rewards of supporting important work. The artists, on the other hand, are relying on a decentralized network of support, not government grants."

That is true in the nonprofit world, though not as much in the past year or two. But as large as that is it is still overshadowed by the investment most of the rest of the world makes for a financial return, whether it is the military for strategic purposes, private industry to make a profit. To the author's credit he does see the benefit of decentralized research, allowing for open collaboration. That has repeatedly been shown as a useful way to structure work. For example, Google makes that possible for several hours each week to their employees - work on what you want. It should bring us a profit.

And one day maybe this government will figure out it gets a better value by investing in the people instead of the banks.