Charles Leadbeater has spent the last few years writing a book called We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. It’s due to be published in the summer, and a draft has been available for sometime on a website, to allow comments and contributions from anybody. He’s developing the book using the very phenomenon that he is writing about.
There are two important angles to this. The first is that the current connected world and web 2.0 technology allows the masses of users to contribute content in ways that were never possible before. The second is that often innovation doesn’t actually come from big corporations, or serial entrepreneurs pitching their next big idea to the VC community, but from the users and consumers themselves.
In this great TEDTalk from July 2005, Leadbeater explains with some great examples. Mountain bikes weren’t invented by some bicycle manufacturer. Enthusiasts made a mashup from available bicycle components, and the sport was around for years before the first specialist manufacturer Marin started. It was much later before mainstream bike manufacturers took the concept on board. Another example he uses is Rap music. If you turned the clock back 30 years, would you have had much success pitching the genre to the average music company executive? Now it’s a multi-billion sector of the music business.
Leadbeater describes the new approach to tapping in to the community as a development resource. There may only be 1% of active contributors in any given community, but think how that can multiply a company’s productive resources. As he says, we now live in a world that has turned:
“users in to producers, consumers in to designers”
This is the key to the success of the open source software movement. It’s why initiatives like SAP’s SDN are so significant. It’s why the availability of products like Teqlo or Yahoo Pipes are so important in allowing power users to create new application mashups. I’m sure there will be some very significant new products and sectors that are created by the users rather than the developers during 2007.
This was a great TED talk from a while back. TED starts today in Monterey, California, so I’m looking forward to some great ideas and presentations being broadcast in the coming days. I wish I was there.
