Innovation is a Virus

We have been told by patent holders, mostly large corporations, that intellectual property rights encourage innovation.  Copyright laws have been extended from 14 years to up to life plus 70 years. Competition is said to accelerate creativity. Do these ideas serve innovation or corporate greed? 

As an artist I know that creativity is iterative, it’s built upon lots of versions, ever changing and constantly informed by the creative works of others. Art begets art. If you try to create art in a vacuum, you may get results, but you’ll get better results if you study art history, exchange ideas, techniques or critiques with others. The more open we are the more likely we are to be exposed to more interesting ideas and to see the big picture. Compartmentalization does not work very well for spreading ideas.   

We have this romanticized idea that innovation is the child of singular genius, that some few of us have an almost magical gift to have aha Moments – it makes for a better story.  Steven Johnson in his new book, Where Good Idea’s Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation, tells us that Innovation is more likely to come from a network of people working intrinsically, than from a single person working for profit. We certainly do have singular geniuses among us, but they are the exception, not the rule. 

The reason that people working together for the love of the work innovate at a higher rate is that they are more focused on innovation than making money. Copyrights, patents and corporate security act as barriers to creativity in order to protect wealth. Johnson doesn’t argue against intellectual property rights, just recognizes that they can get in the way of propagating new ideas. Putting walls up around innovation is like keeping someone with an infectious disease quarantined. It keeps ideas from spreading. 

Innovation is like a beneficial virus, the more an idea spreads the greater chance of its surviving and thriving.  If it survives, propagates and mutates, more interesting things and more failures will be the result.  The road to innovation is paved with mistakes. The best ideas, according to Johnson come from the Adjacent Possible, from the edge of what is now possible, not from giant leaps forward.

More innovation has come from informal talks at coffee houses than brainstorming sessions.  As Johnson says, “All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters… do the best in open environments, where ideas flow in unregulated channels.” 

Comments

['stina]

An idea similar to this one has sort of been floating around in a lot of the blogs I read today, with regard to the movie The Social Network and the creation of Facebook.

I think Ezra Klein started the discussion, but I saw the thread picked up a few other places:

At the same time, of course, Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, and a variety of other social networking platforms were swirling about. After all, technological advances had made these things simple enough that even college students could pull them together in a few weeks. If it hadn't been Zuckerberg, it would've been someone else. Maybe Goldberg.

This is a rather common phenomenon: It's called "simultaneous invention," and it happens all the time: Technology advances to the point that the next step is obvious to multiple people, and so they all take the next step at approximately the same time. In the end, one of them gets the patent, or the market share, and so squeezes the other out and becomes synonymous with the invention. That's what happened with Alexander Graham Bell, who in all likelihood invented the telephone after Elisha Gray -- and both of them came after Antonio Meucci. Amusingly, the discovery of "simultaneous invention" was another case of simultaneous invention, with multiple thinkers and researchers publishing on the phenomenon all at once. "Unjust Deserts," by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, has a good discussion of this.

Kevin Drum has more.

[Eddie Colbeth]

Stina,
Thanks for the insightful comment! Johnson talks about the idea multiple sources for the same innovation in his chapter on The Adjacent Possible, which is basically combining two or more things in a way they had not been combined before. Johnson says, "Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air: they are built out of a collection of existing parts..."

['stina]

heh. I stumbled upon this video that Johnson put together to explain where innovation comes from, and I raced over to share it with you, not realizing that it's the same Johnson you were talking about in the above post. I think he's hawking his book through this video, but it's a really nice summation of what we're talking about. Obviously I like this stuff and need to go out and read the book.

[Eddie Colbeth]

That's a great video! Dan Pink had a similar one done for Drive. It's a great way to tell a story.

Thanks!