Collaborative Age value production system | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How Intellectual Property is changing – too slowly but in the right direction

There are increasing calls for profound reform of intellectual property. This is a subject close to heart that we touched on in our posts Patent trolls and the end of conventional intellectual property and How patent litigation cost half a trillion dollar inefficiency in the last 20 years!.

What are the evolutions lately? This paper by Joseph Stiglitz “Lives versus profit” summarizes the incredible issue of companies that try to patent our genes, at the expense of us all. According to Joseth Stiglitz, “More broadly, there is increasing recognition that the patent system, as currently designed, not only imposes untold social costs, but also fails to maximize innovation“. And further, “unbalanced intellectual-property regimes result in inefficiencies – including monopoly profits and a failure to maximize the use of knowledge – that impede the pace of innovation“.

Things seem to be changing in the perception of lawmakers. A new proposed bill could end the worst patent troll behavior by simply getting them where are the most vulnerables – money. Read more about this initiative in the paper ‘Death to patent trolls: How a new bill could slay technology’s worst parasites‘. Patent trolls are just a nasty way of doing business by taking advantage of real innovators through old tactics such as intimidation and brutal force in front of a court. Let’s hope this bill will pass and be effective.

Reform of our intellectual property regime, one of the most important institutions of the Industrial Age, is a prerequisite for moving straight into the Collaborative Age. Those countries that will overcome the particular interests of some of their industries to reform effectively this field will have a significant competitive advantage. Why are so few doing it?

Why Face-to-Face Meeting Will Not Become Obsolete Soon!

Recently, I have been working for a client who has deployed an advanced, high definition video-conference technique called Telepresence. It tries to simulate talking to people on the other side of the table.

I was amazed when a few weeks later I happened to meet physically with a person I had only seen before in video-conference and he announced we had already met. I was astonished. I had seen him, of course, but did I really “meet” him when I participated to this video-conference? I did not feel so.

Because a physical encounter involves much more than a video encounter – touching, reacting in a common environment, different perspectives on the person, a closer insight into his whole body language. Even in a few minutes you know more about the person than after 3h of videoconference! I also realize it is easier for me recognize people I have met physically than people I have only seen through video-conferencing.

The amount of data from a physical encounter with a person is still much higher than what technology can convey. Establishing a relationship at the emotional level can only happen with face-to-face encounters. And emotional connections are essential to work as an effective team. This is why I constantly recommend, in particular in the case of remote teams, to have teambuilding sessions involving most of the team, to build that emotional connection. Later remote work is then facilitated by the already established connection.

Face-to-face physical encounters with new people will always remain an essential need. Worldwide travel trends are not going to stop soon.

Why a tight co-located core is still required in organizations

Following on our post Why Face-to-Face Relationships Are Still Essential to a Creativity Culture, we need to recognize that some successful collaborative endeavors have flourished across continents in the past few years, using the tools of the Fourth Revolution: Linux, the Anonymous, Wikileaks, to name a few. Some high-tech companies like the acclaimed software company 37signals leverages a worldwide community of programmers, and it has become common practice to hire remote contractors anywhere in the world.

What is then the difference between those organizations which can work collaboratively and remotely, and those that require co-location to create the appropriate context for creating their value?

The actual difference is between the core of the organization and the collaborators. The core of the organization always requires tight collaboration, that always leads to co-location and face-to-face relationship. It is the only way to create effective teams that create incredible stuff. And when one looks at the great examples of remote collaboration, there is always a co-located core of the organization.

Around this core it is possible to leverage a more or less tightly knit network of (occasional or permanent) remote collaborators.

The size of the core depends on the activity, the type of project and the endeavor. Sometimes even it can remain at the level of one or two individuals for simple and straightforward creations. This is why it looks like sometimes it is pure remote collaboration.

The incredible value is always created in a co-located core of the organization. Where is your core?

Why Face-to-Face Relationships Are Still Essential to a Creativity Culture

When Marissa Meyer, the new CEO of Yahoo, banned full-time work from home last February she ignited a lot of criticism.

(see for example the Guardian’s article “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s work-from-home memo is from bygone era“).

At the same time Apple is building a 3 billion dollars’ (now gone up to 5 billion dollars’) specially thought headquarters to lodge their employees and promote maximum collaboration.

Even with social networking and all these tools that make long distance interactive communication so present in our lives, does tele-working allow the right culture and collaboration to develop?

New Apple Headquarters — The new Apple headquarters: like many creative companies, Apple invests heavily in physical infrastructure to enhance collaboration

In the case of large companies like Yahoo and Apple, or even Facebook, it does not seem to work. Face-to-face collaboration, nurturing chance physical encounters on a campus seem to be the best way to foster creativity and productivity from collaboration. In the case of Yahoo, after one week of shock, papers started to appear showing that possibly, taking this decision was the only way to allow a new Yahoo culture to develop and flourish (see for example the paper “Marissa Mayer Got It Right — You Can’t Fix A Broken Culture When People Aren’t In The Office“).

The power of face-to-face relationships, their intensity and the unconscious exchanges that occur, are still central to collaboration. Or are they? In the next few posts we will explore the conditions in which collaboration can still happen remotely.

How 3D Printing Technology Shakes Consumer Protection Institutions

3-D printing is already shaking our institutions. The recent issue of a 3D printed gun – and the availability of the drawings for free on the web – has scared many. Governments are already considering how they should change the regulations around weapon acquisition and export; on the other side hackers defend the freedom of internet.

Cory Doctorow, an expert on the internet regulation (and generally, a proponent of a large freedom), fears that these events will lead to inappropriate regulations of internet content, due to the fact that judges and societies will be scared by the object.

For guns, regulations might change to address ammunition rather than guns (nobody has yet managed to 3-D print live ammunition and it will take a long time before anybody can do that), but in any case, drastic changes will necessarily happen.

Guns are a very polarizing issue. But what about more conventional liability for hurting someone with a 3D printed object, or damage to property? How liable would be the person who put the design on internet, in a 3D enthusiast forum and who lives at the other end of the planet? How would the entire sets of regulations developed to protect the consumer from defects in products need to change?

All these questions are in the air. Because the institution of manufacturing changes, so needs also the entire set of regulation, or regulatory authorities. It is just the start of a drastic revolution. Watch how it unfolds over the next few months!

How 3D-Printing Is Redefining our World Quicker than We Imagine

You will not have missed a few events that shook the news in the past few weeks and which are related to 3D printing, a new Fourth Revolution manufacturing technology (refer to our post on POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing):

the issues around 3D printing of guns and the availability of those drawings on the net to anyone, which by-passes all the weapons-control regulations that were based on conventional manufacturing traceability – see for example an Australian reaction here,
the fantastic rescue of a toddler with an artificial trachea that was 3D printed and will dissolve itself progressively as tissue will build around it (more on this here, here and here; the technique is not really new but always impressive: re-view also this great TED talk mentioned in our post Manufacturing Revolution reloaded: 3D printing of human organs is real!)

Like every new invention we can see here, almost at the same time, the two sides of it – the most beautiful at the same time as the ugly, destructive side.

But for the moment, is there a better proof that this new distributed manufacturing technology starts to shake the world as Chris Anderson predicts in his latest “Makers” book?

Remember the time where computers were huge expensive machines and people thought the personal computer would never happen and never be found useful? If you are working in a manufacturing industry, you’d better beware of what is going to happen as manufacturing becomes personal and decentralized!

First hand evidence that our traditional schools are obsolete (Video)

For those of you interested by education or training, the following video is a MUST-WATCH. It explains from where our current education comes from, why “schools as we know them are obsolete, why we don’t need them anymore”. It shows how children can learn collectively from a computer in a brick wall in India, and how a school can be built in the cloud with grand mothers and passionate adults to collaboratively educate millions of children.

It also shows how we can collectively learn much better than by ourselves! “In 9 months a group of Indian children left alone with a computer will reach the level of an office secretary in the West“. Amazing? Scary? How fast do you guess will tamil-speaking children in a remote village in South India learn the techniques of DNA replication in English by themselves? Watch out!

The next time you want to teach a group something completely new, dig a hole in the wall, put a computer with the topic and let them play with it until they get it!

For further insights on the issue of education, TED is curating a page dealing with the educational revolution (Re-imagining School), grouping all the talks about the topic.

The Demise of the Publisher: Content Marketing

During the Industrial Age, Publishers enjoyed a fantastic position as being the only one to be able to spread the information. Newspapers in particular, were the only way for companies to advertise until the invention of other broadcasting techniques such as radio and TV.

In the post “Content marketing is our next big revenue threat — unless we embrace it now“, Kylie Davis provides an excellent summary of the issue that publishers face today, in the particular example of newspaper publishing (however this would apply to all other broadcasting media).

In summary, those organizations that were using publishers as intermediaries are now broadcasting directly their message to the world. No need of a publisher any more! Why would you continue to believe that only publishers can get you access to some kind of captive audience that you would not be able to reach otherwise? You can, today, make your information available on the internet in a format you can better control, using all different kinds of techniques from written ads to videos.

This is what is called ‘content marketing’. Kylie’s position in her post that it is possible to make the published content evolve to make it better suited to the advertiser’s needs can be discussed – in any case it shows that the publishers cannot any more decide what’s worthy or not as when they enjoyed this fantastic monopolistic position of being the only ones able to spread information to the world.

As we move through the Fourth Revolution, organizations and individuals will increasingly publish themselves or through content aggregators. Publishers will become extinct as a profession. It is ineluctable.

How humans intervene in Internet’s workings

“There has been a shift in our thinking,” said Scott Huffman, an engineering director in charge of search quality at Google. “A part of our resources are now more human curated.”

Brain in a computer — Which is really the brain of internet: humans or chips?

This is an except of an interesting paper, Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers. Where you discover that humans are increasingly being used to increase the relevance of some choices where algorithms struggle.

According to the paper, there would be an increasing trend in putting humans at the core of certain processes to enhance them. Is that a temporary fix until new algorithms appear that would be better or is it a durable trend? Actually there seems to be two types of human intervention:

those that do systematic data churning like the Facebook and Google Indian offices that administer part of the services – they will be replaced someday by a machine (like we had mentioned in our post on Google Maps, there are armies of people behind many of the internet services we are using daily, that link or correct information that machines cannot link or understand properly.)
those that work to improve the machine (algorithms), which are those mainly described in the paper and which number will remain steady or increase in time.

Internet is an ever complex machine that needs engineers and technicians to improve the tools. When it comes to the borders of human nature and psychology, humans will remain for long at the core of the design of the machine.

Of course, the internet algorithms are still designed by humans. And as requirements become finer and finer, edging to psychology, humans are still indispensable, with an ever higher level of knowledge. And humans will remain so. Machines are not yet fully in charge!

How we can really identify important information

We still identify important information through personal contacts (or even, get the information through these contacts) – and this will continue. Faceless social networks will not replace the amount of information filtering through personal trust. Internet will not replace personal networks built over time and patience.

social word of mouth in action — Nothing will replace personal networks as a source of worthy information

While our information environment has grown to the point of being inaudible, we try to filter it, and we do that by leveraging on our network. We look at those links and materials shared by our known contacts with much more interest and focus. We ask our relations to help us in finding the right answer to our needs.

Some marketers are trying to leverage this observation into a technique, like Andy Sernowitz and “word of mouth marketing“.

Fourth Revolution’s social networks allow us to draw much quicker and easier on our community of relations, and get to the information efficiently and remotely. Yet it does not mean that we would believe social networks members we would not know personally, or with which we would not have developed a relationship through consistent exchange over time.

Do you leverage enough your network community to filter out important information or to get informed of things that are important to you? What could you do to make it more effective?

Why it is ever more difficult to identify actionable information

The Fourth Revolution comes with a new challenge for most of us: we have much more information to our fingertips or in our phone than ever before – and potentially, too much information, a noise that hides what might really be important.

We have maps, public transportation schedules, the latest news and rumors from all over the world in our pockets. We can apprehend the world with a detail never achieved before. Yet the same old problem still lingers: how can we really identify what is important for us and for what we intend to achieve?

What is really difficult is to extract the useful information. Data might be available but because connections don’t happen, it is not transformed in useful information (for example after 9-11, it was ascertained that federal agencies in the US collectively had enough data to understand what was being prepared, but failed to connect the pieces). Even more annoying, because there is ever more data available, there are ever more spurious correlations – and the possibility of wrong decisions and innocent people being impacted.

We all reach the limits of what we can physically receive, process and transmit (whereas in the past that was only limited to a few individuals at the top of organizations).

While some believe that thanks to new technology, we are better informed in our decisions, it might not be true. Because the background noise intensity has grown so much, it has become harder to discern the important information. It also sometimes give the wrong impression of being able to understand what is happening.

How are you discerning important information, the information at the basis of your action?

How to Really Being Productive in the Collaborative Age

“Being productive isn’t about wringing every last minute out of every day doing something or checking stuff off a to-do list and building a relentlessly efficient system that allows nothing through the cracks.” – Amber Naslund

Productive Ape — Is that the way you are productive?

Now that’s quite an interesting thought, which is further developed in this blog post “Rethinking Productivity“.

Amber Naslund is an entrepreneur and she’s working in social networks business. She’s quite advanced in the Fourth Revolution. So, no wonder that when she looks at productivity, she looks at it from the point of view of the K.E.E.N. (Knowledge Exchanging Enhancing Networker): productivity of the K.E.E.N. is very much about creativity, not about repeating tasks efficiently!…

Let’s leave the last word to Amber:

“We need time to float along on the breeze. Have a casual, spontaneous conversation. Enjoy some silence. Write a bunch of random stuff that we never finish, and be okay with that. Productivity, at its essence, means being able to bring things about.”

The good thing, is that it just killed our guilt of doodling around (next time you’re asked, say that you are growing your next ideas)!

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