rapid and prejudiced assumption that sharing reduces our own personal abundance. There are lots and lots of goods that are non-rivalrous (the new push towards open data for example), and many once-rivalrous goods that can now be shared (cars) thanks to technology. We’ve also come to appreciate that anything with a network effect actually has a much higher value the more it is shared (carsharing, ridesharing, social networks, mesh networks, the Internet).
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of writing and talking on this topic of increasing openness.
4. EXPERIMENTATION & EVOLUTION. The ability to experiment, iterate, adapt and evolve. In some cases, even if we deliver up items 1-3, there are some sectors in which we still don’t get much innovation because of institutional or government barriers. The status quo has developed a whole set of rules and regulations to protect existing ways of doing things, as well as protect the health and safety of people. I would put the automotive, housing, and a good piece of the telecommunications sectors into this category.
Sometimes the rationale is good and sometimes it isn’t. In any event, if we are going to see successful innovation, we have to let small scale (some volume) experiments flourish without many of the safety and regulatory requirements we place on large volume sellers of goods and services. Bureaucratic and even well-meaning red tape just make experimentation impossible.
A quote I heard from Tom Watson, founder of IBM: “If you want to improve your success rate, double your failure rate.” And a far less elegant quote from Robin Chase: “If you want to improve your innovation rate, open up more data, devices, networks, platforms, sources, and stuff.”
[Editor’s note: This post first appeared on Robin’s blog, Network Musings.]
