Extended rant: Mark Helprin is not a crowdsourcing/social tech fan

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Tags

crowdsourcing, Innovation, social media, social networks

McKinsey’s Mary Kunz interviewed Mark Helprin and discussed various issues connected to his view that the “‘all free, all the time ethos’ of the Internet threatens to erode the creation of new knowledge and new art”. Helprin is a staunch skeptic of the creative and innovative potential of the Internet. In fact, he stakes out the position that, at best, it will lead to sub-par innovation and, at worse, threatens to degrade our entire modern culture.

Now Helprin does make some valid points; however, I think on balance the conclusions he reaches about new technologies and techniques is overblown and based on his own biases and misunderstandings. I’d like to speak to a few of them below:

Mark Helprin (MH): Before there was copyright, there was very little incentive for people to actually write things and assemble information. With the development of copyright, all that has increased.

I agree with Helprin here and there is quite a lot of excellent research (particularly by economic historians like Douglass North) to back up the notion that the institution of copyright and associated legal protections such as property rights, patents, etc, led to an explosion in creativity and economic development in the Western world. So, point for Helprin.

Mary Kuntz (MK): [...] There’s a lot of activity online right now that’s all about collaboration and crowd sourcing. And some of what gets produced that way people call art. I gather that you would take issue with that?

MH: I would. Crowd sourcing—to me, the words are a nightmare. The great achievement of Western civilization, anyway, has been to end the collective approach to things that marked the early history of man.

In other words, you were defined as part of a group. You were a serf. You were a peasant. You were a slave or whatever. And then in medieval times, you were a member of a guild. And the rights of the individual didn’t really count. What happened with the Greeks and then with Roman law and then over a long, long period culminating in modern times is that we have refined the rights of the individual. Now, obviously collaboration can be very powerful, and it’s important, and we do things in concert with one another. And we advance science that way and many things. But there’s really nothing that can substitute for one mind and one voice.

In a single thought, Helprin does two things: 1) illustrates that he does not truly understand crowdsourcing, but sees it as a threat anyway (and he is surely not alone here); and 2) his entire premise (“nothing can substitute for one mind and one voice) is based on a myth (that of the lone or heroic innovator/creator), one that is contradicted by the two sentences immediately preceding it. Continue reading

The Firm, Transaction Costs, and Organizing for Innovation

27 Tuesday Oct 2009

Posted by Bill Petti in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Business, crowdsourcing, Innovation, Organizations, social media, social networks, transaction costs

Ana Anjdelic responded to my latest post with some very interesting points. She commented that some of my suggestions would significantly increase transaction costs, specifically information search costs incurred by firm. Ana notes that increasing transaction costs in this way contradicts (or runs logically counter to) Coase’s view of the firm. She writes:

It’s true – knowledge “reshuffling” is key to innovation (or, as you said “when it comes to thinking, we need more disruption, not less.”) This reshuffling, however, creates a lot of “noise” (how do you know what you are looking for before you find it?), and ultimately accounts for less-than-efficient organization, because it creates crazy transaction costs.

And reduction of transaction costs is what made firms show up in the first place (in opposition to markets), as Ronald Coase would have said.

So, the very condition that’s critical for generation of new knowledge and/or recombining old and new knowledge is actually detrimental for efficiency. The question then is, how to combine organizational efficiency with innovation?

I think Ana is right to invoke Coase’s theory and to be concerned about drastically increasing transaction costs and it got me thinking.

My view: while historically firms were able to lessen the search costs associated with valuable information, this no longer applies. Firms are no longer the most efficient and effective means for collecting and sourcing innovative ideas and insights. Therefore, as Coase’s theory would predict, firms may need to go beyond their four walls an turn to the market, effectively outsourcing (or co-sourcing) a large portion of idea generation. Additionally, firms can further reduce information and search costs by leveraging technologies that tag, catalog, and organize knowledge–both within and outside firms. Continue reading

We are all creatives now (or, at least, will be by 2013)

23 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by Bill Petti in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

Big Data, creatives, data, Nate Silver, noise, signals, social media, sophisticated aggregation

SEED published an article the other day that discussed the coming impact of near total authorship. The gist of the article is that at some point, nearly everyone will be able to publish content and that this will have profound implications for society in much the same way that near universal literacy has.

Authorship over time

So what are the implications for universal authorship? SEED mentions one and I have another that comes to mind.

The first implication is in the article: as more and more people become creators of content it will become increasingly difficult for organizations of all kinds to control their messaging and their brand. Provide a bad customer experience and it will be on facebook, immediately broadcast to hundreds if not thousands of people. Discriminate against someone because of their race or sexual orientation and they will tweet about it, likely prompting dozens of re-tweets which allows the issue to reach exponentially more people, who then might blog about it, and so on, and so on. Organizations are already finding it hard to control their brand, imagine when the number of authors increases 10 fold (which, according to SEED, will now happen yearly). Theoretically, firms and technologies that can monitor content related to an organization will be big winners. Additionally, organizations will need to invest more heavily in their own networks and crowds to help combat negative content (whether true or false). Continue reading

The ‘Soft Sciences’ to get their Day?

11 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by Bill Petti in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Big Data, social media, social networks, social science

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences.

Stanley Milgram

Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though she never really uses the words “social networks” the implication is that most companies aren’t really geared toward taking advantage of the impact of these online communities, and that the numbers will be too large to ignore, regardless of the business you are in.

“Many of the needed technical capabilities originate in the social sciences and are aimed at usability and adoption of technology-related business services,” Harris said in a release. “These capabilities embody the notion of ‘action at the interface’ between the enterprise and its markets or between business management and technology management. Therefore, organizations are likely to shift the responsibility for leveraging technology outside centralized IT organizations and into the business units responsible for growth and innovation of revenue, products and services.”

Erving Goffman

To me, if you combine the plethora of data being generated by Web 2.0 technologies with the inherent social and behavioral aspects of these technologies, it screams for individuals that have training in sophisticated research methodologies (both quantitative and qualitative) as well as substantive subject’s that relate to sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics. It may be creating a perfect storm where individuals with this particular skill set finally find themselves in high demand outside of the Ivory Tower. As a trained social scientist myself, I also hope it puts to bed, once and for all, the short-sighted notion that the social sciences don’t really belong in the category of ‘science’ compared to their physical cousins.

(Via Jason Spector)

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