Charles Leadbeater, a leading thinker on innovation and creativity puts himself ahead of the competition in the popular management/economics literature by embodying his 'you are what you share' moto, placing the first 3 chapters of his new book 'we think' on his website.
He gives novel examples of how communities can generate ideas towards solving complex problems such as the 'i love bees' game where thousands of gamers shared insights generated through clues distributed in the network to form plans which eventually resulted in a synchronised wave of 'ah-ha' moments to solve the problem.
Leadbeater's insights are charmingly conveyed: to achieve the venerable zenith of frontier thinking and innovation your company only needs four people; a computer nerd, an academic, a hippy, and a peasant.... though any liberal blogger phd student from rural Ireland knows that. In this way the knowledge of villages is conveyed, elaborated on with scepticism, and the ideas are tested before being released into the 'wild' of the internet and given life by computer nerds. Nice!
Here is a link to his TED talk
He talks about the mountain bike as an entity emerging from collaboration rather than a lone genius, or a large corporation. My personal favourite example in this realm is the 2007 Noble prize for medicine shared by Capecchi, Evans, & Smithies, for the 'invention' of the knock-out mouse by combining methods pioneered by individual researchers who then modied genes in embryonic stem cells and injected those cells into fertilized mouse eggs to make it possible to rear mice with discrete genetic modifications that would be inherited between generations (see Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2007).
He disagrees somewhat with the idea that clusters of creative individuals in 'special' places such as cities is the best way to generate innovation as this model does not give appropriate weight to the consumer as co-producer of the product and the idea of 'invention through technology usage'. He uses the phrase 'pro-ams' to incorporate those who take their leisure pasttimes quite seriously and generate ideas which are personally important to them, and which they are willing to share. Consumer driven innovation and the user as producer models are clearly best seen in the main microsoft competitors, systems such as Linux, Firefox etc.
However, generalising this model to other forms of production is the main problem that I haven't seen answered yet. Anyone who has listened to the Ray Darcy show on Today FM in the mornings, whether or not this is something you like(!), will know that the user as producer model can definitely generalise to other medias if enabled by a structured system and a group of open-minded facilitators.
In social science research we have consumers as designers to some extent in that qualitatively assessed ideas are embedded in quantitative tools. But there is more here in terms of the value of consumer feedback for intervention and theory testing and modification.
2 comments:
didnt have time yet to watch this but in general its very interesting to think about what motivates people to contribute to these type of mass creations. Im sure there's work out there but in general its hard to reconcile some of this with standard theories of labour supply. Why do people write wiki articles? Why do people keep blogs like this? I do notice that some of the radio shows nowadays are kept alive by really funny texters.
just listened to it there - really interesting talk - his question as to the relative role of public broadcasting and public bodies as well as open-source volunteers would be a really interesting research agenda.
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