Disclaimer: my thoughts and words, not those of Channel4.
There are many passages in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody worth reading if you’re in telly, or any media, really. One of my favourite ones follows, and speaks about the superior quality filters which open-source, people-powered systems tend to produce. They do so by allowing 100x as many failures as the traditional corporation. Why? Because failure in this environment is free; and every time you fail at something, you learn how to improve. Not so in Old School Business:
The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood. Imagine that you are spearheading an effort for a firm that wants to be more innovative. You are given a list of promising but speculative ideas, and you have to choose some subset of them for investment. You thus have to guess the likelihood of success or failure for each project. The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail.
The effect, therefore, is that only the projects deemed less risky, and which fare well in traditional ‘cost/benefit’ analysis, will make the cut. There may be a great desire for innovative projects in one’s company, but you are still putting great trust in the executives who must pass judgment on those potential projects. In other words, you can’t ever count on the wisdom of crowds in a company that has limited funds to dispense on ‘innovation’.
These words were loud in my ears when I last thought about 4IP, Channel4’s ambitious bid to transform public service media. (The name stands for 4 Innovation for the Public.) I know that there have been plenty of kick-off meetings about new ways of working, collaborating and building relationships and so on that will drive the project forward. And there have been lots of debates about what the gelling idea behind the project is. Lots of forward-thinking people on board. Lots of buzz in and around Channel4. But there’s the rub: according to the blog, the Fund “will support up to 30 independent web sites, offering innovative or public service content to audiences.”
There’s that hand-selected subset again…the traditional business model. How will 4IP ensure innovation, if conventional investment procedures tend to short circuit high-risk, but potentially world-changing enterprise? Say 500 ideas come in through 4IP’s golden gates. The commissioners will surely have a hard time selecting which ideas they will go with. The Fund will end up funding less than 10% of the ideas, some of which may not succeed, especially not in the long term.
Sure, it’s a fantastic ambition to support 30 worthwhile online services, but I just wonder whether there’s another way to nurture more ideas. Perhaps engineering a system whereby each of those 500 ideas can receive the ‘light’ of public scrutiny, and more importantly, the public can choose to contribute time, money or thinking to any idea they deem worthy. They might become as much a partner in the project as 4IP. That is the spirit of open-source, and why open-sources projects have progressed faster, and more cheaply, in many ways, than commercial launches. But I can understand the need and desire of the 4IP bods to want to focus on a few high-profile projects, and not spread their efforts too thin; after all, there will only be a few 4IP commissioners…versus nearly 70 million of us in the public.
There’s plenty of public service initiatives out there that promise funding in the UK. One recent find was Show Us a Better Way, which focuses on a more specific question: how to better use publicly available data. That I can sink my teeth into right away; I may even submit an idea tonight…
One Comment, Comment or Ping
As you say, opening up the project, to some degree, at the commissioning stage, would also allow people to get involved. While 4IP represents an amazing financial platform, the convening power of the C4 brand, which could deliver invaluable early users and testers, might be just as valuable. The public may vote for a project and follow it’s progress, which could lead to some vital insights, as well as motivation for the entrepreneurs involved.
July 21st, 2008
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