Joichi Ito - Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants - NYTimes.com
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself. (…)
The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled.
This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.” (…)
This technical strategy has led to the creation of a gigantic network of far-flung innovators who develop standards with one another and share the products of their work in the form of free and open-source software.
In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map, and “rough consensus and running code” has become the fundamental philosophy for the so-called lean start-up movement. (…)
(…) The students at M.I.T.’s Media Lab experiment, create and iterate; they produce demos and prototypes, and share and collaborate with the rest of the world through the Internet and a distributed network of connections and relationships.
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
(…)
Excerpts from Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants - Joichi Ito
