Before we delve into the depth of ideas I need to put up a little disclaimer. You see, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this subject myself. I have some on-going internal battles whether all ideas should be shared and/or to what extent. Perhaps it should be okay to keep some ideas to yourself? I don’t know. But if we widen our perspective from the rather narrow self-centred to a broader more fellow-being-greater-good type of perspective it makes very little sense to keep any idea secret.

Right now, as I write this there a lot of questions are popping up into my head and I’m having a difficult time keeping myself focused.

• Despite the fact that competition is part of human basic nature, could a collaborative mindset overcome this?
• Would society and economics as we know it still function in a society where sharing is paramount?
• What exactly are the incentives for innovation?

It’s the human nature

The Neuro Revolution

I’m currently reading a book called ‘The Neuro Revolution’ and they wrote one very interesting thing. While competition is part of human nature, nothing swings weight like collaboration. Through experiments it has been scientifically demonstrated that we are more creative and better thinkers when we collaborate.

Our society is very much built around the notion of scarcity and creating competing products. It has allowed for a somewhat diversified market where there are an abundance of products. Whether or not they are useful I’ll leave for you to decide. I honestly can’t judge whether this ‘abundance’ is a good or a bad thing. Would this alleged product abundance disappear if ideas were shared? I personally don’t think so but I can’t be sure.

In some industries, like the car-industry, we can pretty much only choose from petrol driven cars. I do realize that the last couple of years have brought us a few alternatives, hybrids, hybrid-plugin and pure electric cars. The electric car have been around for a good few decades, but it’s only now that it’s becoming a viable alternative through improvements in battery-technology and so forth. Still, the market is very much driven by a few big corporations, and they wield a massive amount of power.

I don’t know if an idea sharing society would be able to prevent these mega-corporations from getting a foot-hold in our society. My main problem with our economy today is that there is simply way too much money ‘stuck’ in companies. What’s the point of having lots of money if it’s not spent? I read somewhere that if we took the money of the top so-so-number of rich people every single person on earth would have one million pound each. Even if it’s not entirely accurate it’s still some pretty staggering numbers. Imagine if we combined this with the top companies I’m pretty darn sure that we could guarantee every person on earth a very good life indeed.

Industrial-espionage paranoia

One of the biggest problem facing innovation is that we are so very afraid of sharing our ideas with others, even our close friends. Suddenly we go all industrial-espionage paranoid and seem to think that everyone around us is out to steal our idea. As if most people aren’t already too self-absorbed. Steal your idea… right. I’ve not yet managed to reach my own conclusions regarding idea ‘hording’ but I’m starting to believe that too many ideas never see the light of day because we’re just too afraid someone might steal it.

Don’t for a second think that I’m not thinking this myself, I certainly do. But I’m trying to understand my motivations for doing so. What exactly am I afraid of and is it a reasonable fear? As humans we tend to greatly overestimate dangers and risks so in that regard I’m somewhat confident that my fear of sharing ideas is not necessary.

Why should we share our ideas?

I think one of the primary reasons of why we should share our ideas is because we couldn’t possibly act on all of them. So fine, let’s keep a few to ourselves, but we shouldn’t keep all of them. If we do they will only become a thing of our mind-history and eventually be forgotten. Even if we have to do some sort of transition into a society built to reward sharing, we need to find those transitional steps, and perhaps one could be to start sharing some of our ideas. But how do we effectively share and communicate our ideas.

Well, that’s where my portal comes into the picture. I won’t talk more about it here, but keep an eye on http://www.stay-open.com, the doors will open in December or January 2010. I’ll start talking more about this idea of mine soon and it really gets me excited!

Another reason for sharing is that we need to start trusting each other. My future ideal society is very much built around trust. Our current one, is not. You can see it at work or at home, the trust is just not there 100%. I guess it might be naive to believe that we could ever get a society built on 100% trust, but we should try to strive for it at least. In a society where trust becomes implicit idea sharing wouldn’t be a problem.

Oh, just thought of another reason of why we should share ideas. Not a single person on this earth have done absolutely everything themselves. We have to rely on other people. I’m definitely a victim of thinking that I can do everything myself. If I have an idea, I want to execute it myself entirely. Clearly it’s not worked out that well for me and yesterday I realized this. Obvious one might say, but it wasn’t for me. I felt I had to be in charge of absolutely everything.

Ops, the post is getting a bit long, I’ll stop now.

For some reason I’ve hesitated writing about this topic, because I’ve felt, well, intimidated or something. In previous posts I’ve hinted, ever so slightly, at having a more ambitious dream than finding a guiding purpose. Perhaps that thing is my guiding purpose? I really don’t know. Any way, I’ll just blurt it out here instead of sitting here typing, erasing, typing… trying to make it sound amazing.

I want to unite thinkers across the globe, to enable the collective power of thought to solve our most eminent and difficult problems. The basic premise behind the idea is to have a portal where problems are shared, worked on, brainstormed, solved … collectively. Today we have universities working on similar problems or doing the same research, but have no effective way of sharing information with each other. There’s no easy way to collaborate.

My solution, which I for now choose to call (for lack of a better description) ‘Communal Collaboration for Distributed Thinking’. It sounds all fancy schmancy, but it’s really nothing spectacular. It’s a way to distributively do problem-solving, amongst a large group of people. My dream would be to have this not only apply to problem-solving but also innovation. I genuinely believe that society will never prosper unless we start acting as connected individuals. Thinking individually is fine, but we need to make the intelligent decision to consciously move towards a thinking where the society as a whole is considered, not only the benefits to one particular individual.

For those of you who have seen Star Trek you might be familiar with the Borgs. They have a superior way of assimilate and distribute the knowledge. Each borg is connected in a big mesh network and information is immediately shared amongst all peers. Each borg is capable of acting upon their own impulses and do their own thinking, but everything is shared with the rest of the hive.

Clearly, I wouldn’t want all human thought to be part of my own thinking, but the idea of sharing knowledge and wisdom without restriction very much appeals to me. A real world scenario of what results this could potentially yield is a natural catastrophe. At almost any such even people are forced to work together and the results are outright amazing. It would seem as if nothing is insurmountable when it comes to collective processing. The scientific community also have this very much ingrained. You share your research because claim to fame here is through your work and the knowledge your share, not how much money you can generate from it.

There is however a problem in reaching this ideal state of mind; ego. Most people are hesitant of sharing, what they consider are their best, ideas because they want to monetize them. Trust me, I’m no better, but I want to change this. I believe there to be no easy way to achieve this, but I would imagine that the first step has to be all about overcoming the way of thinking that ideas must always be monetized. The truth is that most ideas are never communicated to the public in fear of loosing out on it’s money generating effects. These ideas are never acted upon, what a waste!

Instead of encouraging and rewarding knowledge hoarding, we must instead encourages and rewards sharing. This is possible and it’s already happening in the software world where the Open Source movement is making headway in exactly this way, through sharing. Yet there are ample opportunities to make money and a thriving business supporting it exists through various efforts. And it’s all about sharing. To gain popularity you have to give away more, and you’ll generally receive more, it’s that simple.

This is why I have begun building on my portal that I intend on bringing to the world. I’ve started sketching on the blueprint for the architecture, writing documents to describe the idea. In due time I will share with you this whole, to me, very exciting idea. If you already feel this is something that appeals to you, please, let me know and I’d be happy to share with you the idea and everything that I have to say about it.

Whether this is something that can generate money or not, I don’t know. But what I do know is that if it could even support me partially it would be fantastic and if not, tough.