Quiggin, John
2008
Amateur content production, networked innovation and innovation policy

“Traditional models [of innovation] based on a distinction between publicly funded pure research and commercial development based on patents and other forms of intellectual property no longer appear relevant to the needs of a networked economy depending heavily on amateur production.”

“The 19th century model of cultural innovation“: The individual inventive genius (Faraday).

“The 20th century model of technical innovation“: Large scale research institutions (universities) + (private) industrial research laboratories.

The 21st century model of innovation: amateur collaborative innovation

“In most sectors of the economy, the rate of technological progress has slowed substantially [in the 21st century].” (Boeing 747, fridge)

“motives [for amateur collaborative innovation] like these do not co-exist well with a profit motive.”

“amateur innovation is unlikely to be promoted by policies that sharpen financial incentives. On the contrary, the greater the potential for well-informed market participants to extract profits from a given activity, the less willing amateurs will be to make uncompensated contributions.”

“Any correlation between the capacity of a site to capture AdSense revenue and the value of the site to its users is indirect and tangential at best.”

“innovation in a network economy typically requires contributions from widely distributed sources and yields benefits that are diffuse and hard to capture. There is no easy way of relating the rewards of innovation to the value of individual contributions.”

“The vast majority of market returns from internet services are tied to advertising.”

“Amateurs have little or nothing to gain from intellectual property rights and are correspondingly unwilling, and often unable, to pay others for the right to use patented or copyright items that derive much of their value from the collective contributions that make up the network.”

First step in policy for networked innovation: “it is necessary to encourage creativity in all its forms. Since the outcomes of creativity cannot be prescribed in advance, policies to encourage creativity must rely on providing space for creativity, including access to the necessary resources, free time for creative workers to pursue their own projects and the communications networks necessary to facilitate creative collaborations.”

“technical and cultural innovations are increasingly intertwined”