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Get Four
|  | AUGUST 11, 2004
Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection [Page 2 of 2] Q: What might keep these powerful incumbents from holding back this tide? A: You've got to have some huge force outside of the United States, where it's getting locked down. What if China says, "The FCC doesn't rule us. We're going to stop assigning frequencies within our borders. We're going to regulate devices so that they play fair with each other, and we're going to open up spectrum." That's going to make the U.S. an economic and technological backwater. Then there's always the idea that maybe we're just beginning to see disruptive technologies. Maybe something is just going to blow it away. Certainly we've seen that over and over again in recent decades. Q: Where will we see that happen? A: We now have a world out there where billions of people have in their pockets technologies for innovation that far surpass what entire industries had just a couple decades ago. If you're talking about the communications industry, your innovation is happening with 15-year-old girls. That was where [Japanese cellular network provider NTT] DoCoMo (DCM ) won big. I think the total number of text messages sent is approaching 100 billion a month. Of course, the revenues on that are only a fraction of a cent each, but multiply a fraction of a cent by 100 billion, and it begins to add up to real money. You're seeing that now with the picturephones. People are not using them the way it was predicted. They're using them to share their days: Here's a picture of somebody's haircut. Here's a picture of somebody's melon. Look at this shoe in a store. It wasn't determined by an expensive R&D lab. It was determined in practice by young people who appropriate these devices in unexpected ways. There's nothing more inventive than a 15-year-old. I don't think that's going away. If I was a Nokia (NOK ) or a Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), I would take a fraction of what I'm spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you're going to make a billion dollars off it. Q: A focus group on steroids. A: This would be more like ethnography, where you let them loose and watch what they do. If you want to think out of the box about innovation, let's not put all of our bets on 50-year-old PhDs in laboratories. We now have dispersed the means of individual and collective innovation throughout the world. Here's where Wikipedia fits in. It used to be if you were a kid in a village in India or a village in northern Canada in the winter, maybe you could get to a place where they have a few books once in a while. Now, if you have a telephone, you can get a free encyclopedia. You have access to the world's knowledge. Knowing how to use that is a barrier. The divide increasingly is not so much between those who have and those who don't, but those who know how to use what they have and those who don't. Q: Some folks in the U.S. are worried about the competition from overseas that comes from that dispersal of knowledge. A: We should have thought about it when we sold all those computers and chips overseas. These aren't just widgets. These are the building blocks of innovation.
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