The new blog is here....
What will marketing look like in ten years? Or five, for that matter?
Let me be more specific: What will "marketing" look like in a world where all 6.5 billion human beings have a web address as surely as they have a physical one?
When every person is a brand, we will have officially entered the post-brand era, in which the basic model for creating one's identity will be entrepreneurial. For a sneak preview of what lies ahead, run don't walk to What MySpace Means, a one-day event being held by the Engagement Alliance on June 21st, where yours truly will be presenting on what MySpace can teach companies about cultivating an online culture, particularly at the internal level.
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If I've been scarce here lately it is because I have taken on a new consulting job, helping a high-tech hardware startup manage what is turning out to be an avalanche of IP. I cannot discus the particulars of the technology, but suffice it to say that this company, which recently completed second round financing to the tune of $6 million, will be papering the town with provisional patent applications over the next year or so.
Inventors are a lot like artists. They have identical creative processes, including the highs and lows, aha!s and fallow periods. What differs is that their "art form" has no fixed means of turning the creative act into a durable artifact. What I mean is that when your metier is having ideas that can later be turned into "methods and apparatus," to use a bit of patent lingo, a great deal of the execution of your work is beyond your control, and beyond the reach of your skills. What is the invention? Is it the finished product? Is it the idea itself? Is it the patent? What is the inventor's medium? Writing? Drawing? Prototyping? All of these are imperfect manifestations of the valuable contribution itself. In short, inventors are like artists without an art form.
My job, right now, is to attempt to build up a methodology that can support an inventor's native processes, to get the inventor's creative output to stream into the work flow of the company, without inadvertently creating a dam.
The challenge is to avoid the kind of soul-killing "project management" approach that most companies use to impose order on chaotic processes. Did Tolstoy take a "project management" approach to writing novels? I hardly think so. I want to create a structure in which creative thinkers can effectively communicate their ideas without imposing any kind of conformity on the ideas or the process of generating them. (Hint: Will the end product look a lot like a blog? It just might.)
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Last week I was at a Thai restaurant with some friends, and due to a kitchen mix-up, our waiter ended up with an order of deep-fried smelt on his hands with no paying takers, so.... That's right, free smelt!!!!
Want a free website of your very own? Go tell Thame at Erratic Wisdom (who coded and designed a snappy luxury goods blog for a friend who lost interest), why you deserve to be the new owner of this particularly free enterprise and he'll throw in the url, too. Nothing fishy about this deal....
In this month's lead essay at Cato Unbound, 'Why Aid Doesn't Work,' William Easterly makes a rational case for directing international aid dollars toward programs where the results can be objectively measured by hard scientific methods. He's persuasive, but in the end, the scientific method is still just a patch, a facsimile for what's really missing: legality.
In the developed world, the distinction between government and non-government organizations is meaningful, but not in places where government is corrupt and ineffective. In a lawless state (ie, one where corruption dominates the channels through which people get things done, for good or for ill), both aid organizations and entrepreneurial warlords effectively operate by the same rules. One's moral orientation is not the point. If the basic sphere of operation is illegal (in the deepest sense of the word), then there is little chance that your efforts will result in enlightened, long-term improvement. Will Connors, a Chicago journalist and blogger working in Ethiopia has written compellingly about corruption in the aid community there.
Any aid-before-government aparatus is still going to break down--it will just do so further down the road. As Easterly suggests, you may demonstrably produce healthier, taller, better-educated children by buying them meat to eat twice a week, but if the best they can hope for is to grow up to be a corrupt low-level official, have you really accomplished anything lasting?
Better to see aid dollars spent as investment dollars--sunk into private businesses, rather than programs of any kind. It is possible. It is even possible that the weaker the local (corrupt) government, the greater the opportunity for leveraging capital investment. In Carol Pineau's documentary, Africa: Open For Business, the CEO of Daallo, a Somali airline, marvels that the only reason he's able to thrive is that there's no government at all in his country. No government means no corruption, he observes dryly.
cross posted on Samizdata.
Here are some excellent reminders of exactly how disruptive innovation has always been, by definition (duh). From Tina Roth Eisenberg, whose design blog, SwissMiss, is one of the little things in life that make me happy when I'm not listening to smart people make frustrating, stupid statements about the future (fortunately for me, according to the research, it's the small things that make you happy anyway, not the big things):
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
(Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895)........
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
(Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943)........
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
(Ken Olsen, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)
Jeff Trexler calls isolatr "Web 3.0." I just call it funny:
subtitle: beat the horse slowly (as in I've said all this before, I know, I know)...But I just posted this on Samizdata.net, and Qumana is making it easy for me to spam my own blog with cross-posts, so here goes:
Tags: patents, IP, intellectual property
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Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine's correlation to B12 levels, then we'd all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis. To play devil's advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO's criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness.
There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web--people who can understand that markets are conversations--can't seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures.
Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more….
By offering a proprietary position on a piece of work, for a fixed period of time, we gain permanent open access to the idea and the process that led to it. The granting of patent rights is a collective cultural and financial investment we all make--and if you're a libertarian, this is the kind of tax you want to pay. For the applicant, the filing of a patent is a form of open intellectual engagement with the world of ideas, a bit like the exercise of free speech. You can also call it opportunism if you like, but it's a functional question at root, not a moral one. Like them or not, patents and the culture of open exchange surround them foster more innovation than they retard.
Look at Gallileo: had he been able to hand a patent application over to some proto-Jeffersonian (the US's first VP took patents home in his briefcase every night), rather than having to lobby a bunch of recalcitrant "experts" in skirts and surplices, he might have enjoyed some freedom from worry and gone on to further acts of creativity. If not by profiting from his work, at least by virtue of the systemic protection afforded by the very existence of a patent office.
We tend to blindly assume that all great men and women we admire maxed out their creative potential--they achieved greatness, didn't they?--but if you look at their histories, you find that usually they limped to greatness under extremely unfavorable conditions. The culture of the patent has gone further toward ameliorating this culture-retarding situation than any other institution in the history of mankind. And it can go further.
There are plenty of valid arguments out there for why our patent system is broken, like this one comparing the USPTO to Bastiat's Fallacy of the Broken Window. And there are also plenty of ways to fix it. But I'm concerned about the baby in the bathwater. Why should these protections not apply to the inventors of non-corporeal stuff, as well as thinkers whose contribution is to connect non-obvious dots?