Technology and Organizations

Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine) presents a spectacular cover story on “The New Industrial Revolution.” The teaser reads:

The factory, the investors, the workers — obsolete. In the age of DIY manufacturing, all you need is a garage and a great idea.

He opens with an example of a crowdsourced car:

Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

The Rally Fighter is a great example and raises the possibility of crowdsourcing for complicated systems. …but then the article goes into overdrive:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

The article is part economics lesson, part how-to. Chris includes his own story, describing the founding of DIY Drones, a community site focused on amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Within the community, he met like-minded and skilled collaborators and now markets autopilots and other related products. He includes great detail throughout, including tools and production outsourcing links.

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We need to get our minds around the possibilities of this new industrial revolution. Chris Anderson and others have focused on D-I-Y (Do It Yourself), but I think it’s more than that. I see this new approach as D-I-O (Do It Ourselves). Each of his examples highlights the value of collaboration. These are not stories of lone inventors (except for his description of professor Bob Kearns’ invention of intermittent windshield wipers — but he apparently goes mad — so much for the lone inventor…).

My own interests are around how to support DIO organization through my teaching and research. In an earlier post, I claimed that “Recruiting, Knowledge, Evaluation, Tools, and Market seem to be five foundational ways Web 2.0 supports innovation.” Now I realize that DIO is more than about just innovation. DIO seems to be providing the foundations for what Anderson calls small batch entrepreneurship (with credit to blogger Jason Kottke). A new industrial revolution. I look forward to your comments as I think out loud.

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For a different take on the value of crowdsourcing, please see Sarah Cove’s (for Wired News) Interview of Douglas Rushkoff What Does Crowdsourcing Really Mean.

Soon: A review of Cory Doctorow’s Makers (free download):

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

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I agree with Nicholas Thompson. In his Wired article, Too Early to Criticize Obama’s Tech Policy?, he proposes “Not an A. But not a C either” for the grade to give the Obama administration in this first month and a half.

As I noted in an earlier post (also linking to a Wired article), the government is hamstrung by its size, and by a variety of laws meant to provide access and protection to all. Fast prototyping is not as attractive when a mistake is a breach of Federal law and likely to be covered by the national and international press.

I urge us all to give the administration some benefit of the doubt when it comes to technology implementation. However, I also hope our representatives are seriously considering how much of this needs to be specifically covered by law, and whether some of the laws that we have need to be revisited in light of modern technology and its use.

One issue of concern in the new Wired article is where the role of CTO sits. Thompson writes,

The most legitimate complaint so far is that Obama has yet to appoint a CTO. Not only that, but the position appears to have been demoted. The Sunlight Foundation caught an executive order declaring that the CTO will sit in the president’s Domestic Policy Council. That’s better than what some people feared—that the CTO would just be knocked into the Office of Management and Budget—but not nearly as good as people hoped when they had visions of the CTO (Eric Schmidt!? Jeff Bezos?!) sitting in an office down the hall from Obama.

Structure and technology go hand in hand in good organizational design. I’m hoping that we get both a CTO (to guide government technology policy) and a CIO (to guide government technology infrastructure). In the mean time, I’m following the blog, Tech President, described by Thompson as the “best blog for following these issues in depth.”

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