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Mass Innovation and Disruptive Change
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 11, 2006 01:32 PM
from the look-to-the-internets-for-inspiration dept.
from the look-to-the-internets-for-inspiration dept.
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?
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Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
You are delusional. (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of creative people (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, with the possible exception of the power router I might argue with this, but I think I'll just restrain myself to the opinion that musical com
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:2)
Woodworking tools require money and, more importantly, space.
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:2)
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:2)
True, but a table saw, band saw, workbecnch, etc, take up significantly more space, especially considering the sawdust that makes a workshop incompatible with a living room space unlike a computer. As somone living in an apartment but wanting a workshop, t
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:3, Insightful)
A modern drill press is only a t
That's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
My daughter's school is noticably better than in my day. Anyhow, I don't think school matters much in the US, to be frank. School tends to focus on
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Not one giant heard, but many. Because of immigration and ad saturation, we are a fairly diverse test-bed f
True (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:True (Score:2, Insightful)
Because of the pro-rich administration, the wealthy have too much money these days (perhaps at our expense) and so are using their spare
He can't be serious... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:2)
Yeah - hurray for artificial barriers such as DRM, propietary formats and bogus patent bullshit. Call me naive, but openness and actually being bett
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between an "evil" barrier to entry and a "good" barrier to entry is marketing.
Take Google. They have a huge database of webpage
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:2)
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:3, Insightful)
The question there was about attracting funding. In that context, you're completely wrong.
Getting startup funding is about offering 10:1 odds on 100:1 mone
Disruptive Change (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that looking where everyone else is looking is the surest way not to find disruptive change. If you want to invent a disruptive technology, the last place to look is where everyone else is.
What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a crock (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree, on three grounds. First, what the web brings is
To expand on your point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oddly enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I think the most significant thing undergraduate degrees teach people in preparing to enter nearly any field is how to deal with a hostile, overbearing, inefficient bureaucracy infested with sadistically egotistical ladder-climbing prats and their
Gosh. Golly. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
nope (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
"Instrumentalism?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Instrumentalism?" (Score:2)
"So if she floats, she must be made of wood."
"Burn the witch!"
Mass Innovative Change? Hardly likely (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Inkorrekt (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but its true.
Disruptive change never comes about via the masses.
What masses. Masses are composed of people, individual units. Le Bon's contagion theory of mass psychology has been fairly comprehensively disproven, to my satisfaction at leas
Very little creativity on the Web today (Score:3, Informative)
Disruptive change is a mistake. (Score:2, Insightful)
"instrumentalism"? (Score:2)
Disruptive technology defined (Score:2, Interesting)
View from the coal face... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:View from the coal face... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, the irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Trends say otherwise (Score:3, Interesting)
The Industrial Revolution was characterized by economies of scale. Large steam engines, huge factories, massive capital expenditures, etc. But this is the Information Age, which doesn't need economies of scale. Small is better, and the individual is rising in importance. The two centuries that gave us collectivism, groupthink and the centralization, are giving way to a time of individualism and decentralization.
Software is an example. The old industrialist model of software development is to have rows and rows of programmers sitting in cubicles, each working on one small part of the whole. The model promotes outsourcing to the cheapest possible programmer with the required skillset. But that model is rapidly fading away, to be replaced with small teams and distributed collaboration. In contrast to the article's premise, innovation in software is routinely performed by individuals.
Wonderful (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The masses WILL innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The masses WILL innovate (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The masses WILL innovate (Score:2)
Re:It takes more than just innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I do not concur (Score:3)
Re:agree (Score:2)
Re:more new economy BS (Score:3, Funny)