Where Good Ideas Come

Platforms

Goods Ideas: Platforms and Conclusion

The Internet is similar to a coral reef in that both are platforms that provide enormous opportunities for the emergence, growth, and development of other ideas or life-forms. Coral reefs are very dense and diversely populated ecosystems that are entirely dependent on the platform of the coral skeletons that make up the physical structure of the reef, just as the internet has become richly and very diversely populated with different ideas, applications, and capabilities all of which are dependent on the communication capabilities and certain fundamental Internet protocols that allow this information to be created and shared. Both the Internet and coral reefs are also, interestingly, built on other platforms -- computer networks and volcanic islands, respectively -- demonstrating the "stacked" nature of many platforms and platform systems that exist in both the natural and man-made worlds.

2)

McAslan's architectural projects build on their natural environments, demonstrating one use of platforms, but more than this the projects described in the McAslan case study create platforms where the exchange of ideas is more fully and completely supported. The industrial warehouse-located cafeteria that brought people form all parts of a fashion company together serves as a platform for generating new ideas to solidify and grow that business, and the integration of the many different buildings of the banking complex in Turkey provides exactly the same encouragement of diversity and community building. These are the social and intellectual platforms that serve as the intangible yet very real and very necessary foundations upon which growth and evolution occurs in human efforts.

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At the same time, coral reefs and the Internet were unplanned and emergent platforms -- the individual coral organisms did not set out to build a rich environment that supports some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, nor was there a consensus formed within the coral community to achieve this purpose; likewise, the Internet was only planned in some of its very first limited applications, and grew in a very unplanned manner into what it has become today. McAslan's buildings, on the other hand, are designed to foster innovation and collaboration, but in a very planned way and with fairly specific goals in minds (i.e. enhancements to specific companies engaged in very specific pursuits). It is likely that these artificial platforms will not be as wildly successful over the long-term, but they make more sense for businesses with limited resources and planned growth targets/areas.

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Simply put, APIs seem to rely primarily on the platforms of the Internet and of standard programming languages, using these common elements to build -- or allow for the building of -- new technologies, applications, interfaces, etc. For companies like Twitter, APIs are better than traditional models because they exponentially increase the potential for and realization of innovation by vastly expanding the number of contributors and innovators that can make use of the underlying technology. This has the additional benefit of attracting wider classes and larger numbers of users/consumers to the technology, not just because they will be drawn to the increasing number of innovations and applications for which they can use Twitter and other similar services, but also because they will be drawn to innovate themselves.

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The fourth quadrant of idea generation that Johnson identifies are those innovations that are not motivated (at least directly) by market forces (i.e. there is no monetary incentive for the innovators) and that are developed collectively by networks of individuals or firms. More innovations come form this quadrant for several reasons, but one of the key reasons is that when market forces (monetary gain) is involved, laws have developed to make the exchange of ideas deliberately inefficient and difficult, as a means of protecting the original progenitors of innovations and inventors of new products. These laws and rules do not hinder innovation and communication in the fourth quadrant, however, which also demonstrates their dependence on free platforms -- there must be some shared foundation upon which the innovations of the fourth quadrant can be built, because there are not the commercial resources to build from scratch.