According to Nielsen studies, the time spent on Facebook on average in the US is now (August 2011) almost 8 hours per month – up from a bit less than 6h in August 2010.
That’s the average for 163 million US Facebook users. Or, in total, an astonishing cumulative 54 million days spent by all US Facebook users during that month. Communicating, chatting, sharing, collaborating.
It’s a flood of collaboration. Is that time wasted or time used appropriately? Some bloggers seem to think it is time wasted: see for example http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/. The name of the link is revealing of the mindset of the writer, although the post itself is just named “You spent 8 hours a month on Facebook [STATS]“.
Well people obviously find an interest and prefer to go on Facebook rather than watching TV. And although many Facebook posts are quite superficial, no doubt there are nuggets there ready to be harvested.
The Fourth Revolution is just kicking off. Time spent on Facebook and other social networks generates value. How do you benefit from this value?
Actually I encourage you to dwell into the projects and see how the site works. Did you get it?
No, the power of Kickstarter does not lie only in the fact that it allows funding for creative new ventures to happen through the accumulation of numerous small donations (the crowdfunding bit).
It also lies in the fact that donors vote with their feet (or rather, their keyboard and plastic card) on what projects they find the best. It is intrinsically a voting engine.
It also lies in the community building power around each project, with the project owner giving away some goodies to the generous donors, giving updates on the project progress after it has been funded…
Thus, what looks like pure crowdfunding is also a vehicle of choice and community building. It is a vehicle of the Collaborative Age. Below what just looks like a fun crowdsourcing service for weird creative projects lies the fuel of the Collaborative Age value production system: communities and crowd-voting.
The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.
The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.
Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008
In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.
n-gram from servant to employee
In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.
n-gram from spiritual to emotional
In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:
collaborative networking chart
The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.
I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.
What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.
What can we learn from this example on the conditions for this to happen?
Here are 6 key conditions:
have a large enough community because the percentage of people that are going to involve themselves deeply is small (the minimum size of the community depends on their initial level of engagement, but is at least a few thousand members). That might take some time to build up, which means giving out for some time as an investment; and any pre-existing network is clearly an asset;
make sure the community has an emotional engagement into the topic (due to personal or family history, the particular topic, or make the medium addictive in itself), and that the topic has a lot of meaning to them – aligned with their self-purpose;
allow the community members to communicate with each other transversely;
offer recognition to great community members contributions (not only external recognition: internal recognition inside the community is also appropriate); even better, allow community people to rate each other’s contributions;
interact with the community by responding in a reactive manner to issues and questions so as not to lest unwanted issues fester;
provide regularly challenging, unconventional problems that tie with the sense of meaning of the community.
Do the community network that you hope to leverage follow these 6 guidelines? What can you do today to improve the health of your network and benefit from the Fourth Revolution value?
By crowdsourcing the search for the best 3-D molecular configuration they were able to get the help and support from a large community. By making it like a game, they leveraged an emotional appeal to the effort. And they solved a previously unsolvable problem in only 10 days!
This example is particularly noteworthy because anyone – no need to have any knowledge in molecular physics – can play the game. But don’t believe it is an isolated case. Such competitions and game are spreading through all disciplines now, to leverage contribution from anywhere in the world.
What is always amazing, though, is that at the end, the number of really dedicated, passionate contributors is always very small – no more than a dozen or a few dozen. But because the tools attracts talent from around the world, the best suitable, available people are there. And from their kitchen, stay-at-home moms can contribute to the progress of science.
Also noteworthy in the article is how the final discovery built on top of the progress made by other members, and how the small community of dedicated hard-core members is deeply in conversation. The lone genius concept is definitely obsolete.
Welcome to social community-based science.
Welcome to the Fourth Revolution’s value and knowledge production system.
While many still believe that Manufacturing (or Industry) is key to value creation, it is very obvious that since the 1980’s, Services have gained preeminence in the economic world.
Moreover, more and more people do not appear in these statistics now, because they are ‘self-employed’! Which is definitely a global trend nowadays.
Even more striking is this graph from the Fourth Revolution book: it shows the composition of the top 100 companies in the US over time. What do we observe? Suddenly from 1985 onwards, Service companies have become the vast majority of the biggest companies.
How Services have taken over from Manufacturing in 20 years
This is identified in the book as one of the precursors of the Fourth Revolution. Value has shifted dramatically. Manufacturing will become like Agriculture: necessary, but a small part of the economical value creation.
That might be hard to understand if you’re borne before 1970-75. Change your mindset. Value is not any more in manufacturing nowadays. And Apple recently overtook Exxon as the largest stock valuation in the world.
The Fourth Revolution is here. Today, value is created overwhelmingly elsewhere than in Manufacturing.
“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
This is a quote by Howard Aiken, and American scientist (1900-1973) who was very much involved in the computer and electronics field at its outset.
And, by experience, it is held to be true by all the players in front-edge products and companies.
It just means that if your idea is really original, people will just not believe in it. Not only that, but they will try to kill it and discourage you.
So don’t worry about the competition – at least if you pursue this visionary idea persistently. Your following will come. And when you will be successful, you will redefine the market.
An other meaning is that an idea is nothing without its execution. What’s really difficult is to put it in practice, implement, tweak, mature it – and to do it against the rest of the world. That’s where the value lies. Anybody can have fantastic ideas. Not so many will be able to implement them. It takes focus, time, patience and persistence.
The defining criteria of patents should not be any more that some kind of prototype has been produced, but whether it has been adopted by a large following. Nobody cares about an invention if it is not used, and it is not appropriate to have the inventor become rich because somebody else managed to use the idea to produce social value.
Let’s change intellectual property. Let’s make it social. Ultimately, that’s where value lies.
Let’s repeat: the cost of defending innovation has been 500,000,000,000 (500 billion) dollars for publicly traded defendants since 1990! And it has increased over time to a staggering 83,000,000,000 (83 billion) dollars per year in the last four years!
And some researchers (Bessen and Meurer in their book Patent Failure) have shown that showed that, outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the cost of patent litigation had already begun to exceed the rewards to inventors by the year 2000. Their new work suggests that the problem has gotten much, much worse since then. And that the intellectual property system is definitely broken. It is supposed to bring wealth to society; actually is stymies it!!
The book “Patent Failure” is reviewed here. I can’t help copying in this post – with all due respect to copyright – a stunning graph from the book (other industries refer to other than chemical and pharmaceutical – mainly software):
Patent litigation costs are now far higher than benefits
No doubt. The intellectual property system is deeply broken and needs to be mended. Otherwise innovation might just be scared away by a bunch of parasites.
And… what better illustration for the Fourth Revolution ignition?!?
No doubt – that’s an area where the Fourth Revolution is already there and deep institutional changes are required, and fast.
Have you read lately about “patent trolls” (companies that make their living by doing nothing, just sitting on a few juicy patents)? Or the battles between Apple and Samsung, Google and Microsoft, to win ownership of treasure troves of patents, avoid long and costly legal battles about patent rights… Or the billions of dollars earned by lawyers in the field of patents in the gigantic battles that are ongoing?
In the Fourth Revolution Book, we relate how similar situations arose at the onset of revolutionary inventions, like how the patent for automobile was unduly exploited by Mr Selden who made a living by selling expensive licenses for building automobiles. That, until a certain Mr Ford just went ahead and filed lawsuit after lawsuit against him…
So, the current situation is not entirely new.
First, it confirms that something is happening that is revolutionary, in rupture with the usual slow improvement that is best suited for our intellectual property regime.
Still, it shows that the patent regime currently acts against public good, instead of acting in favor. Apple does not really need patents to be the largest market capitalization in the US. This time, the patents conundrum might become so problematic that a complete revamping of intellectual property might ensue. We can’t afford any more to give an exclusive right to an idea for 20 years in particular if this idea is vague or general. Resistance against changing the law will come primarily from lawyers, not consumers or companies. But change is inevitable. Because ideas are now produced collectively, and competitive advantage is based on speed of execution, quality of the product, and not any more on static defense of one’s position.
Which legislator will be bold enough to engage this much-needed change of the intellectual property regime? Shorten the timeframes, ensure that the patents are really specific, that the product described has really been produced, put some limits to the monopoly situation that ensues… such are the directions for a change.
Last week’s quiz was about the deep flaw of any kind of hourly analysis of social networks
The right answer was: because of cheap long distance communication, the entire world – all time zones – is potentially participating to our conversation.
So, time does not have any meaning any more, beyond our circle of friends living in the same time zone.
Based in Asia, I am participating to conversations in Europe and in America. You read this blog and you are most probably more than 5,000 km away.
Time does not matter any more. The sun never sets on our conversations.
Welcome to the Fourth Revolution!
Congrats to Olivier Lareynie for his answer – I am looking for his guest post!
In the following video, Gary Hamel, an influential business thinker, tackles the future of management, or how management needs to change to get out of the Industrial Age mindset.
In the video, Gary explains what is conventional Industrial Age management, where it comes from, and why it is obsolete. Gary also explains what are the characteristics of the Collaborative Age organization. Don’t miss the example of HCL Technologies, an Indian IT company, where employees rate their boss, open a ticket when they are not happy with their boss or HR that get escalated if no satisfying response has been given within 24h, and more!
To finish let us dwell on this quote from Gary Hamel’s video:
You can’t build an organization which is fit for the future without making it fit for human beings
When do you change your organization to be more human-oriented?
[This video will be added to the Fourth Revolution Resource Center. Visit the Fourth Revolution Resource Center for all videos, book reviews and papers about the Fourth Revolution!]
Referring to the graph shown in the previous post about the hourly re-tweeting, such an analysis is fundamentally flawed, just because of the fundamental assumptions of the Fourth Revolution.
Faithful follower of the Fourth Revolution blog, I give out one guest post in the blog for you – yes, you get to write a post yourself – if you find the right answer withing the next week!
