Matt Ridley gives a great TED talk about the power of exchange and specialization.
“What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating and not how clever the individuals are…it’s the interchange of ideas that are causing technological progress.” – Matt Ridley
It’s a discussion about the power of the crowd to mix and mash and build ideas that enable the rapid pace of technological change and increase in the standard of living. It brings me back to a quote I heard at PARC a long time ago:
“Much of what we think of as innovation, is really the creative tension between differing viewpoints”
The PARC team has started to record and publish the PARC Forum events which include some great talks:
- The future of the social web: And how to stop it by Chris Messina
- A post-rational take on people and computing by John Canny
- Ethnography as a cultural practice by Steve Portigal
- Open for business: Building successful commerce around open source by Mårten Mickos
- Feral Technologies: An ethnographic account of the future by Genevieve Bell
- Expecting the unexpected: technology in emerging markets by Brooke Partridge
Many of the talks above are from the Ethnography in Industry series at PARC. But this is about looking outside of your comfort zone for insight and research to inform product design and strategies.