Opening up to the community and removing the selection logjam

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 JISC infoNet

As well as utilising mass collaboration, one of the objectives of KT2.0, is to find ways of making the process financially affordable. Managing the flow of cash and the cost of remuneration is critical. But, critical too is understanding the notion of the rational economic agent - that acts on economic motives alone - is a myth. If you don't buy this watch this presentation.

This is perhaps one of the most counter-intuitive propositions in the approach, because it has - to date - formed the basis of much of the economic theory on this. But the evidence increasingly explodes a series of myths that hold back innovation:

Fallacy 1 - Competition is the Primary or Only Driver of Innovation

This at best is partial, at worst just as wrong. In fact most significant innovations have resulted from networked innovative activity, which is often not commercially driven - but which has major commercial import in the long term. Steven Johnson provides a good outline of this is his book 'Where Good Ideas Come From', on which this TED talk is based.

Fallacy 2 - People are only motivated by Economic Self Interest

People are motivated by a range of needs - self-actualisation (remember Maslow), the need to feel competent (Shirky), the need to feel connected (Shirky), and the desire for autonomy and master purpose (Pink), among others. There has been an explosion of literature and research on this (See the works of Kahneman, Airely, and Pink etc).

All of these drivers have a significant bearing on the ability to find the right external agents to help you progress your projects. More prosaically, even cash-based motivation alone can be deferred or made contingent, via profit share. Royalty or equity sharing is an effective way to provide future motivation and retention - and generally is not permissible for internal staff.

So the lesson from this for KT2.0 is to pay external agents enough to take the issue of money off the table - but not enough to make the activity worthwhile on its own without some further upside. And that further upside can be anything from equity to autonomy. Nobody wants a coin-operated consultant that has no interest in the project itself or its success. It has to be much better for all to have an intrinsically interested and self-directed agent that is determined to succeed - and stands to benefit from it handsomely if they do!

Fallacy 3 - Large Organisations are the Only Way to Make Big Things Happen

Now, the institution, the office or the company are not the only way to coordinate complex activity. Social Media provides the ability for much of this to be self-organised: To be self-organised without the overhead cost, and so that it no longer restricts the ability to scale.

If any of this seems utopian and unachievable, the reader is directed to entirely freely generated complex initiatives such as Linux, Apache and Wikipedia, that have outperformed their more 'commercial' counterparts in the server software space and in the encyclopaedia space.

Or, more directly analogous to commercial enterprises, the Huffington Post that employs approximately 60 people but engages 700 bloggers/virtual employees or Atlassian that taps into intrinsic motivation and the desire of autonomy and mastery.

Most fundamentally for Knowledge Transfer practice, this means the ability to move beyond a constraint to work beyond the 20% of projects that a KTO can afford to prioritise. It creates the ability to outsource the bulk of IP and Innovation that would otherwise be left behind due to a lack of capacity or because it was too expensive to justify progressing.

¹ For an interesting exposition the rise of Collaboration as a strategy for moving beyond the Institution for coordinating complex activity see Clay Shirky Institutions v collaboration