Transition: from personal to collective creativity
“The interesting ‘stuff’ usually is going on beyond the margins of the professional’s ever-narrowing line of sight.” Tom Peters
WE ARE THE HEIRS to a view of learning and innovation that, in the age of the internet, has become, if not obsolete, then certainly outmoded. The idea that great ideas come from great individuals working alone is part of the mythology. When we think of innovation, the images that come to mind are the lone genius, the boffin, the artist in a garret, and the crank.
We divide the world into two, virtually discrete parts: the creative world of special, if not eccentric and unmanageable people responsible for having ideas, inventing products, generating solutions; and ordinary mortals who take these inventions to market. In business, we think of the R&D lab, set in isolation, with its own culture, far away from the cut and thrust of day-to-day business. The only link between lab and factory is the one-way pipeline through which new products are dispatched to operations and sales – and ultimately to users. If we need faster growth, or greater creativity, or a new family of products, we look to greater numbers of these special people to provide them.
The pipeline model of invention-driven innovation is in decline. “Blockbusters”, whether in pharmaceuticals or other industries, are getting rarer. Escalating development costs, riskier returns, shorter product life cycles and cleverer competition mean that innovation is under huge pressure. People are looking for alternatives to the closed, specialist, seemingly unmanageable, pipeline model of innovation.
One way is to move towards a more open, more inclusive, less specialist process, as the internet makes the “tools of collaborative creativity” available to all. Open-source communities are just one of many new organisational forms that are changing the face of innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is becoming something much closer to a mass activity. Almost instant and free access to information and knowledge, combined with the ease and cheapness of communicating globally, have meant that investment in libraries and labs is no longer the only ticket to innovation. We can now talk of “mass innovation”.
Small companies – and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies – are taking a bigger and bigger share of the R&D load. Open innovation models, collaborative creativity on the net, application of the new social media to problems of invention and innovation are all coming into their own. More global, more “amateur”, more voluntary, more multi-disciplinary, more communitarian models for how new products and services are brought to market are being developed.
Big companies are seeking ways to tap into these new methods and communities, co-opting the experience and imagination of customers to co-invent the next generation of products; creative communities themselves are struggling to monetise their business models without being absorbed into corporations.