ORIGINALLY WRITTEN for iF BEST CREATiFES 2012
For centuries human ingenuity has been propelled by access to two critical resources: ideas and capital. And for almost as long, the relative scarcity of those resources kept innovation sequestered within the tidy domain of private institutions and universities. Today the democratizing nature of technology—its tendency to disrupt and to reduce barriers is turning innovation out into society. Wild, unbound and subject to new influences, a new class of innovation is taking shape—one that harnesses emerging behaviors and digital tools to new ends. The net effect is a variety of ‘open’ innovation that stands entirely outside formal organizations and is as likely to be carried out by amateurs as it is professionals. A number of factors conspire to give this spin on open innovation new vitality: a foundation of near-universal access to the Internet, the emergence of no-to-low cost coordination tools and most importantly—a surge in our desire to connect with others in collective action. Examined independently, each of these factors proves a powerful enabler of behaviors conducive to innovation. Taken as a group, their intrinsic ability to reinforce one another creates a potent cocktail of interactions, one that elevates the odds of successful innovation while simultaneously undermining the formal organization’s exclusive ownership of the process.
If you are a student of the web, or of marketplace dynamics, you are no doubt familiar with the dynamics of scarcity and abundance. Most of recorded history took place in a landscape defined by scarcity. If you wanted food or goods, or information for that matter, you had to seek them out and as a result you paid handsomely for them—either in monetary terms or through physical effort. Within this environment creativity and innovation happened in discrete pockets—conducted either by the individual or, in those instances where capital was required, by formal organizations. Furthermore, once innovation occurred, the means for broadcasting it were decidedly centralized: the university, the church, the conquering army, etc. Information technologies, the web and a few centuries of modernization have changed all of that. Today we live in a marketplace defined by abundance. Whether it manifests as cheap consumer electronics, supersized meals or low cost Internet service—abundance and the mechanics it prescribes are hard at work all around us. Within this context, ideas and information become similarly affected, resulting in an ever-expanding cloud of content.
Keeping this abundance from disintegrating into noise is the critical role of the search engine, those clever little algorithms we rely on as we navigate the sheer volume of this abundance. Put simply, they make discovery easy, allowing us to casually call up page upon page of even the most obscure content. By drastically reducing the effort required to access and transmit ideas, the web creates a universal ‘shelf’ of thought starters. One that is open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Elevating the frequency with which ideas are shared and found, this vast repository of ideas provides a tireless mechanism for coincidence, statistically transforming serendipity into intention.
Within this ecosystem of ideas how does innovation take hold? How does the discrete idea progress forward into something that can truthfully be called innovation? Historically the chain of events that typically transformed raw ideas into innovation was vulnerable to the mercurial alignment of time, place and capital. Ideas percolated up within the organization and proceeded through a series of gates, each of which held the potential to encourage or discourage their advancement. Adding to this delicate chain of dependencies, if the idea challenged prevailing logic or conflicted with an organization’s existing business model—that idea, no mater how valid, stood little chance of progressing toward realization. Today these types of barriers, often political in nature, are increasingly offset by the ‘openness’ of the web.
Anyone who has visited a crowd funding or crowdsourcing site has witnessed firsthand the power of the web at organizing discrete actions cheaply, effectively, and to impressive effect. Kickstarter, a popular funding site founded in 2009, has to date raised over $100 million across 10,000 projects; a powerful demonstration that when you bring ideas and funding together—stuff happens. Sites like these, where participants (or backers) vote with their wallets, may not presently constitute a true alternative to traditional innovation, but they do suggest that in an age of cheap, ubiquitous communication, how an idea takes shape and ultimately moves into the marketplace may once again become a matter of genuine merit rather than one of organizational self-interest. Operationally defined by outside interests, sites like Kickstarter circumvent the type of closed-loop decision-making that leads many formal organizations to solutions that are defensible against internal metrics but at odds with long-term opportunity. By virtue of their intrinsic ability to avoid ‘group think’, crowd sourcing delivers wild innovation one of its greatest assets—intrinsic objectivity; a critical component in any innovation process.
Driving all of this activity is perhaps the most impressive piece of this new breed of innovation: collective action. Inherent in every ‘crowd’ based activity, be it Twitter, Facebook or Kickstarter, is a level of participant engagement that rivals the productivity of the best corporate cultures. Fueled by passion and common interest the human capital and expertise these sites assemble should give us all cause for reflection. Internet commentator and author Clay Shirky calls this resource cognitive surplus, an emerging pool of collective idle time that the web makes available and increasingly exploits. Using Wikipedia as an example, Shirky has illustrated that the entirety of the online encyclopedia was constructed in what represents a mere fraction of the time North Americans spend watching television in one weekend alone: 100 million hours. What Shirky and others are starting to recognize is the untapped potential of participant culture to tackle problems with a speed and efficacy that rivals, and in some cases out paces, formal organizations.
Participation and the nurturing effect it has on ideas—either in the form of funding or volunteering time and expertise—is a tremendous aid in vetting raw creativity into starting points for innovation. In an economic climate of continuing uncertainty, compounded by limited financial resource and organizational indecisiveness—the dynamics of participation represents a fresh means for value creation and economic growth. It’s unlikely that these new forums for innovation will replace organizational innovation outright seem, but given the vulnerability of the traditional process to factors of timing, resource and politics, unless we can radically shift organizational cultures in the short term, the economic prosperity innovation once promised remains a long way off. Today a handful of organizations are starting to experiment with many of the tools wild innovation embraces. In response to growing criticisms regarding runaway costs and structural inefficiencies, DRAPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has initiated its Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, a series of publicly sourced efforts that examine new approaches to the design and manufacture of complex defense systems and vehicles. Another interesting signal is the creation of the Eco Patent Commons, a group of elite tech companies (IBM, Nokia, Sony, etc) that have made publicly available their patents that reduce waste, pollution, global warming and energy demands in an effort to stimulate development of solutions that remedy the effects of pollution on our environment. In both examples we see formal organizations adopting behaviors that, while perhaps atypical, ultimately serve their greater needs and objectives.
Wild innovation has allegiance to no one other than the collective wisdom of the crowd. It can result in abject failure and triviality but it can just as easily lead to genuine greatness. Reflecting across the broad set of coincidental factors upon which this process of innovation relies, it’s easy to recall the infinite monkey theorem. That theorem, which also relies on coincidence, states that an event is ‘almost surely’ to occur if it has a probably rate of one; just one occurrence. If a thousand monkey hitting keys at random for infinite time can statistically produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, imagine what the decedents of those monkeys can stumble upon through intent?
