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Mass Innovation and Disruptive Change
bart_scriv writes "The new head of MIT's Media lab argues that societal advances, previously the domain of a small group of individuals, will now become the product of millions of people due to changes in education and technology. He also offers advice to would be start-ups and entrepreneurs, including an argument against instrumentalism: 'The successful will look for fundamental disruptive change.'" There sure do seem to be a lot of creative people doing projects on the web today. What do you folks think of this?
As much as I hate the term, blogs seem to be an opening manifestation of this. Just like there are a whole lot of people out there who can write but, up til now have had no method of publishing, there are a lot of really amazing ideas out there that just plain never get heard or implemented. Open source has changed that a bit, but I expect it to start snowballing sooner rather than later.
A blog about stuff.
Seems to me they're far outnumbered by the un-creative people.
Concepts like "good design" and "good programming" are skills that take training, practice and work. Woodworking tools are cheap, ubiquitous and far more capable than what was available 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Where are all the people building beautiful, elegant and functional furniture?
The new head of MIT's Media lab argues that societal advances, previously the domain of a small group of individuals, will now become the product of millions of people due to changes in education and technology.
That's funny... because it seems to me that in the last 20 years education has only gotten worse and worse.
The head of MIT's Media lab is himself specifically in that small group of individuals that is traditionally associated with societal change. And moreover he's buried far enough inside that group that I don't think he can see that America's educational infrastructure outside MIT is just plain crumbling to the point where the group of individuals equipped to change the world (or at least America) is if anything shrinking...
Right now we are going through another bubble I think with venture capital. Too many stupid ideas are getting funded. It pains me to see these new Ajax sites launched every day and to spend five seconds looking at them and know they have no chance of ever succeeding. At least they fail cheaply.
I think the bottleneck right now is much more on the creativity and business side than it is on the hardware/software side. If you want to be a tech entrepreneur than learn business skills, you can always find someone to help you with hardware and software. Of course you need to understand what is possible, be able to tell the difference between a good and bad programmer, etc.
Isn't this coming from the director of the laboratory whose only successful prodcut is a glowing green ball that changes colors with the stock market?
Seriously, what kind of disruptive innovation has ever come from the MIT Media Lab? Companies have put money in there for years and gotten nothing in return.
By the way, looking for disruptive vs. incremental technology changes is complete and utter nonsense. Entrepreneurs look for where they can make money. There's plenty of money to be made in all kinds of places in our economy, ranging from mom and pop restaurants all the way up to the latest and greatest gizmo. Game changing technology might be interesting or it might not. The road is littered with companies who changed the game and then were crushed by other players.
Money is made with smart market analysis that asks what do people want and how much are they willing to pay. Throw in a way to keep competitors out, and you have the beginnings (but not everything) of a good startup whether you make new fangled ball bearings or web pages. MIT Media Lab not required.
I don't buy his argument. Very few people actually create change in the world. The rest just ride their coat-tails. Smart people are internally motivated - they would succeed in any environment - internet or not. Look at most source projects. Only 1 or 2 people do 99% of the work. All the web brings is a lot of slack-jawed wanna-be gawkers and mediocrity.
There have always been a lot of creative people doing projects on the Web. Ideally, the Web is the province of Creative People, delivering their creative goodness directly to the consumer and bypassing the middlemen, and the tech stuff is transparent, in the background. Nobody goes to a show to see the stage crew, although we know they are there -- somewhere -- and respect their contribution.
Of course, the geeks built the Web, and were the first to know it was there and what it was capable of. As a result, the content of the early Web tended to be content of interest to geeks. That changed, happily, until the geeks developed streamlined means to manage and post new content, giving birth to 'blogs,' which are again dominated by geek topics. This too, is leveling.
Now, an awful lot of creative people like to call themselves "geeks" cuz it's (still) trendy, and an awful lot of geeks like to call themselves "creative" cuz they believe it will get them laid. But the hardcore shakers and shamen in each camp know enough not to dilute their efforts by dabbling; they just count on each other to work their respective money-attracting mojo.
It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas. If anything I'm worried about all the smart, dedicated, creative people in the world being drowned out by all the morons and hacks, who vastly outnumber them, but in the past were kept quiet to some degree...
What you have to remember is that good ideas are not distributed evenly. Some people are vastly smarter than others. Vastly more creative than others. Vastly *better* than others by any way you mean to quantify better. You may have access to the modern equivalent of the printing press, but that doesn't mean you can publish the modern equivalent of the Principia Mathematica (either one).
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible. They allow people who are too lazy or too ignorant even to build their own website the ability to spread their tawdry and mindless blatherings to the rest of the world. People talk about blogs supplanting traditional news media in some ways, but this is true only because traditionally news media has become so watered down and useless that just about any form of media that doesn't talk to you like a child could supplant it. Blogs are *not* an improvement over a good newspaper... it is just that good newspapers are hard to find these days (the seattle times in pretty good though).
You noted "A) not being wealthy makes it hard to innovate".
I hasten to dissagree.
MIT is concerned with astonishingly advanced innovation, but that is the rarest form of innovation.
Most innovation is in smaller products with more creative thought processes using existing technology, than in creating whole new technologies. Thes smaller products and projects can often easily be something a person or two do and create a 10-50 million dollar company.
Lots of examples exist, but they really don't get the headlines, as the pizzazz is not there for news orgs.
Disruptive change never comes about via the masses. Large groups of people thinking collectively (at best) move slowly; their ideas evolve and change over time. They have to be convinced over large spans of time to accept ideas. The masses do not innovate; they smash ideas down and then accept them.
What the head of MIT's Media lab should have been saying is that there are a lot more people on the planet than there were before. With increased numbers over the whole and a constant percentage of "smart people," it would appear that smart people are on the rise.
In the overpopulation of our planet, we are witnessing a lot of smart people being born. We are also witnessing a lot of stupid people being born. Although there may be millions of intelligent humans out there now, there are still billions of stupid ones.
The group of individuals making the change is as small as ever..in terms of how much of the population they take up. And with more stupid people running around, change will happen just as slowly as before (try convincing billions that you are right!)
One last thought - Those making the changes have always wanted disruptive change, but look at the results of their desires. Communism would have been a massively disruptive change (on paper), but once it was implemented, people were able to smash it back down into the monarchy they were accustomed to.
As part of a team engaged in a disruptive Open Source hardware project (http://reprap.org/ I have to say that the guy is almost right. Yes, advances come from large teams, but they need a small, dense and enthusiastic core to start the ball rolling.
:v)
What is essential for a project to spread, other than being useful to the users, it the ability to replicate it on demand. With software, this is pretty easy. With hardware it is currently more difficult, but we're fixing that.
What astounds me is the inability of the commercial world and economists in particular to recognise that there are ways of creating disruptive technologies without being limited by the need to make a profit. I can see a two-teir world developing before my eyes, with the commercial sector deriding anything that is not profitable on the grounds that it'll never spread. Software is so far the only exception to this pseudo-rule, but within 2 years the same will start to apply to hardware as multi-material 3D printers become available for under $1,000.
Vik
There must be a dozen people here posting half-considered arguments about how the internet just enables mediocre people to blather, and doesn't do anything for the gods who walk among us. I'm hoping these are very cleverly ironic, rather than self-defeating.
A century ago people basically lived in one place their entire lives. Anyone could vouch for you so you didn't need a degree to get a job. Then with the rise of transportation, our new mobility outstripped our identity technology. Thus colleges stepped up as the new middleman to vouch for people. Basically, we regressed from networks back to hierarchies (networks are the most advanced form of social organization).
But now with the Internet we are basically all connected, so it's basically like living in the same little village for your entire life. Especially since a record of what you say and do is kept on your home page, so you don't really need a third party to vouch for you. I can send off an email to the CEO of almost any company I'd ever want to talk to or work for.
Also, the fact that as credentialism replaced learning as the reason why most kids go to college, the quality of education greatly suffered. Now it's way more efficient to just sit in a library and read books than it is to go to lectures. I learn more reading a book or two that I did from most of my classes at Cornell, especially since colleges use extremely low quality textbooks most of the time. Some of the textbooks they used at Cornell had advertising in them! Which wouldn't have pissed me off nearly as much if they weren't not only completely useless, but also filled with scores of blatant errors.