Intellectual Diversity in an Open World
Yesterday Spencer Trask’s CEO Bill Clifford participated in a panel discussion on “Intellectual Diversity in an Open World” at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Human Potential in New York. This has not only been a subject of intense focus at Spencer Trask, but has come to heavily influence our business model as well. In a summary below, Bill provides an overview of his conference comments and the future of Spencer Trask.
As a society, we are entering a new era of opportunity unlike any other era in our history as a civilization. All of this is enabled by the convergence of three global phenomena which should propel us to a new era of enlightenment – possibly the greatest society has witnessed since Guttenberg’s printing press (the first actual ‘push’ technology – but that’s a topic for another blog post). These phenomena provide the means, motive, and opportunity to substantially “change the game globally.”
- The Global Ubiquity of the Internet. There are 6.5 billion people in the world, and over 1.5 billion of them are on the Internet. While 1.5 billion may be quite a substantial figure, it leaves an untapped capacity of 4.5 billion people who are yet to engage with the global community in a two-way, collaborative conversation. PC price points continue to decline and both the power and user friendliness of cell phones, PDAs and other internet-enabled devices will extend access to the global community in the furthest outreaches of the planet.
- The Cognitive Surplus. A term made popular by Clay Shirky, the “Cognitive Surplus” speaks to the 1 trillion hours of free time that exists each year among the world’s educated population to contribute to a range of critical endeavors, from environmental conservation to the health care, academic, and financial industries – and all of our other institutions which find themselves under attack. These 1 trillion hours of contributed ideas and innovation can be harnessed for participation in the greater good instead of the usual passive consumption that has typified the use of society’s free time. As a race, people would prefer to do something versus doing nothing, and the internet gives voice to these 1 trillion hours.
- Collaboration-Focused Community Platforms. A host of industrial strength software platforms have emerged that organize communities online and provide an outlet for the trillion hours and a voice for the 1.5 billion Internet users. Financing the growth and development of these platforms has been one of our core focuses for years; let me describe how two of our startups, InnoCentive and VenCorps, provide great examples of the community at work.
The first company to crowdsource R&D and leverage open-innovation on the global scale, InnoCentive “makes ideas, inventions, and scientific expertise around the planet accessible to innovation-hungry companies…an eBay for innovation,” explained Don Tapscott, in his best-seller Wikinomics. In the upcoming Macrowikinomics, Tapscott touches on the future of venture capital, describing how VenCorps, “a form of community-powered venture capital, can both filter the global wealth of opportunities and channel more intellectual horsepower into making each investment successful.”
In the same way that Wikipedia is created by a global crowd of editors and contributors, “VenCorps is leveraging collaboration…not just in the process of choosing which start-ups to fund, but to help grow those start-up ventures after the investment is made.” VenCorps has already hatched some truly inspiring companies. Take a look at www.WeAre.Us.com., a forum for patient-led communities centered around those coping with chronic, rare, and life-shaping health conditions (see WeAreCrohns.org).
I would argue that society’s motive and drive to ‘change the world’ has always existed – people would rather do something than do nothing – but the means and opportunity provided by the Internet, the Cognitive Surplus, and now the Collaboration-Focused Community Platforms are new. It would be criminal not to capitalize on these phenomena to create a truly open world and exploit its full potential.
