Open Platforms and End User Innovation

I love Steven Johnson's cover story in this week's Time Magazine. I told that to the Gotham Gal last night and she said "yeah you tweeted that not once, but three times yesterday."

You'd expect a cover story about one of our portfolio companies (Twitter) which mentions our Hacking Education event would excite me. But honestly, that's not why the piece is still rumbling around my brain this morning.

It's the finish of Steven's piece where he talks about "end user innovation" that is so brilliant. He makes this "larger point about modern innovation":

When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early '70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-'80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

That's the thing that gets me so excited to get up and get going every day. Technology has reached a point where anyone can get involved with innovation. Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what it's all about these days.

We are engaged in what Eric von Hippel calls "end user innovation" and it is a fundamental shift in the way society innovates. The Twitter founders are a perfect example. They built a simple tool to share short messages and it has become something entirely different. As Steven says:

It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.

I'd like to do exactly that to my toaster. Since every time I write about something I want, one of you builds it, I'm expecting my microtoaster to show up sometime soon.

Comments

[utilitus:]

The expresson 'fatuous twits' comes to mind...

...but not re Prof. von Hippel, who, based on a presentation he made at that obsolete PhD. factory Berkeley, has studied, at that other notorious value trap, MIT, how sophisticated industrial users feed back into scientific and especially engineering practice. Also, check out Doc Searls' VRM project at that Potemkin Village of cognition, Berkman/Harvard Law.

Jun 05 12:05 PM

[Marc Michel:]

I couldn't agree more with this thought. I can think of very few break out products that haven't come from inside our borders. America's can do and creative attitude is more important that the number of PhD's we crank out.

Jun 05 07:18 PM

[Henry Buttal:]

Fred, with all due respect, I think it is important to separate market identification, innovation and business execution from fundamental research (as performed by a researcher or Ph.D. at a think tank, university or government funded lab).

From a VC perspective, this is the difference between a Twitter being written in a few weeks, and having to fund a biotech over many years.

I have been involved with some really great technology companies over the years - early enterprise object-oriented development, solar powered wireless systems, large molecule drug delivery mechanisms. In every case, we were building on research performed previously - at Xerox PARC, at NREL, at a university.

I never suffered under the illusion that what I was doing was fundamental research for research's sake - I was in fact creating a deliverable with the idea of making money for myself and investors.

And the lost of fundamental research is the danger, with the decrease in Ph.D.s and patents the canary in the coal mine.

Jun 06 10:01 AM

[Lightway:]

"America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself."

These are all nice, but they are all consumer discretionary items, and most of them trace their fame back to the Darpa Internet project, which started in 1969.

I'd rather see us focus on things that are truly groundbreaking, like:

1) Cure for AIDS
2) A manned-landing on Mars
3) Petroleum free, clean-fuel cars

Jun 06 06:25 PM

[Tim Miles:]

I agree with Henry Buttal and Lightway. I think that someone needs to invent "microtoast" to satisfy your requirements. Maybe my wife did this morning when she burnt our breakfast.

Tim

Jun 08 02:20 PM