In October 2013 I attended a FIRE workshop in Ghent , Belgium United
States .
I participated in this workshop because I am interested in
experimentation with the internet in connection with the work I am undertaking
on the development of an author-centric business model, which is designed to
make life difficult for established interests such as publishers, who are
already making life difficult for themselves through their outdated
perspectives about the future of book publishing. They are a good example of
how an established industry is being creatively
destroyed by people and companies from outside the sector – this is what
the internet helps to enable, and this creative
destruction can happen at a ferocious pace, and it is also what free market
economics is about (the internal process of creative
destruction by which capitalism continually destroys itself by reinventing
itself – otherwise called innovation by those not familiar with the jargon of
macro economics).
I came to the workshop knowing that some of the FIRE
projects have funds available for those external to the projects, to undertake
experimentation using the FIRE facilities. I also knew that that the demand for
these funds far exceeds their supply. What I did not know was that most of these
funds are being taken by academia and research institutes and that industry
demand for them is very low. I also learned that there is now an open access
policy, whereby application can be made to use the FIRE facilities on a
self-funded basis. Yet still it is necessary to make the application and to
state what experiments are to be performed. This is an interesting assumption,
for it implies that those wanting to undertake experiments have discovered the
truth, that is to say that they know what it is that they want to do – the hallmark
of those who inhabit a linear sequential world. The trademark also of European civilisation
and a most peculiar way of thinking!
But the world I live in is one where the truth is not known,
where problem finding and problem solving are deeply intertwined, where one
comes to know the world by a complex integrated process of thinking and doing,
which are also deeply intertwined, and where there are interactions taking
place with what is happening elsewhere. This is the world of networked
non-linear innovation which is a characteristic of the internet, and it is a
way of operating that linear sequential minds find difficult to handle, even if
they have realised that this is how innovation in the internet comes about. But
have they realised this?
Life is a journey of discovery, where experiments are a way
of helping to discovery some of the truth! The world on internet innovation is
like this as well. And I note that, to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is
also positioned as a place for internet experimentation, all that is necessary to
provide are contact details and a credit card number, which is one of the
reasons I will be exploring AWS in the near future and steering clear of FIRE,
for it seems also they have decided that they are the ones who will decide who
will experiment and who will not. I have no time for such nonsense.
The workshop can be summarised as a lot of conventional thinking
and taken for granted assumptions, which only a few, those close to the real
world of internet innovation, appeared to recognise as being largely
inappropriate. FIRE as it was presented at the workshop assumes a linear
process starting from Research and Experimentation, followed by innovation.
This is only relevant in certain circumstances, which is something that is not
widely understood. One of the speakers clearly understood this, when he
referred to what he called the ICT
mind-set, and I spoke to him afterwards and then had an exchange of emails
after the event. The text of the email follows:
“About what we discussed at the end of the day - the ICT mind-set. It is actually an
engineering one from the 19th century, applicable to building bridges but not
internet based innovation. What we saw on Thursday were people building FIRE
facilities as though they are building bridges; they design it, erect the steel
and concrete, and only when it is finished do they allow people to use it.
Users are generally not part of this process, for the bridge builders are also
experts, and that is another paradigm (experts know best) that is also failing.
This is a manifestation of what I call the Prometheus Syndrome and it is
destroying Europe economically. This is the
sort of thing I write about in my blog. If I were starting a FIRE project I
would sign-up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using my credit card and ask people
to use it and start a dialogue with these people about how to improve it, what
needs to be added, and so forth, and this is how the Future Internet would emerge.”
Being aware of the existence of another out-dated mind-set,
the either/or one, I mention here
that obviously such an approach is not relevant to all aspects of the Future
Internet development, especially those that users are not interested in, but
which they would probably notice in the future if they were not addressed.
What is most interesting is that Amazon is enabling internet
innovation through AWS and all one needs is a credit card! This gives both
individuals (by which I mean ordinary people who are not part of the ICT research
community) and companies (micro, small and large) access to facilities that
were once only available to large corporations (and European Commission funded
research projects). This is the sort of
discontinuity that renders what Charles Handy wrote about in the 1990s, highly
relevant. Handy said that “in the presence of discontinuities, the models of
the past serve as no guide to the future, in fact they can be very dangerous;
in such circumstances one has to reinvent the world.” He also noted that the
people most likely to do this are the ones saying unreasonable things. If you read my blog on a regular basis, you
may have noticed that I say a lot of – what seems to those who are trapped in
the past – unreasonable things.
Back in 1994 I discussed in a book, many aspects relating to
that which is covered above. I noted that it is not new technology that
delivers competitive advantage, but the ability to manage, adapt, use and
deploy technologies, as part of an approach that also takes into account all
the non-technical elements. An ability to be able to adopt different design
approaches, the ones that others find difficult to use, which include design
strategy switches when these are necessary, is also important. The comment
still applies. We are drowning in technology. There will always be more of it.
Yet most of it can be imitated, or accessed via licenses. It is not generally a
source of differentiation, unless it can be kept hidden, and its presence is
not seen. But that in itself is an outdated approach.
The problem is that most people think that technology is at
the core of competitiveness, which is an illusion. This mind-set is a
techno-centric one. When people look at the world through the lens of
technology, all they see is the technology and this leads to people to believe
that technology is the most important dimension. This however is an
impoverished reductionist view, and only works if everyone else looks at the
world through the same lens. But there are new players in the game that do not
share these particular European ways of behaving. Europe is no longer able to
force the world to be European, so perhaps it is time for Europe
to stop being European!
I have had to take to story telling and using metaphors to
explain such matters, because few people seem to understand anymore what I and
others are talking about. This is also why new perspectives are needed and why artists
and writers need to move centre stage, to bring what is called culture-based creativity
into the research and innovation process, for it is becoming increasingly evident
that those who currently reside in this position – scientists, engineers and
technologists – are, on the whole, not going to do very much different from
what they have done in the past. As one of them said to me about 4 years ago
when we were preparing a proposal that would address user-driven innovation, “it’s a good idea, so long as we do not have
to do anything differently.” And I have quotes in my book from 1994 of
people saying exactly the same thing, even when confronted with the evidence
that shows that new ways of doing things work.
This, whatever you do
never ask me to do anything differently mind-set, one can say, summarises
the problems that Europe now faces – most of those to whom politicians look to
for innovation, do not want to do anything differently. Europe
has indeed become like Prometheus. DG CONNECT’s new initiative known as ICT-ART
CONNECT, offers the hope of changing this circumstance, of exposing the
invisible chains that keep Europe tied to the past, and of smashing them to set
Europe free. But this involves doing research
and innovation differently, which is why I suppose we will be looking mostly at
replacing those who currently undertake this type of work, by developing a new
breed of engineers and technologists, for the evidence suggests that the present
incumbents will not change and do not want to change, which is the hallmark of
something else – a paradigm shift.
So we are back once more to my forthcoming book Moments in Time, a novel about time, set
in two times, which explores that which is timeless and that which is not –
particularly the values and beliefs of scientists, engineers and technologists,
for central character is an engineer, along with his industrial era values,
beliefs and mind-set! And from this stems all the troubles that he creates for
himself.
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