The new democracy: innovation

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, wrote recently about Eric von Hippel's book and lecture on Democratizing Innovation. Irving himself is a terrific thinker, having been intimately involved in crafting some of IBM's Internet strategy, promoting open source software, and evangelizing grid computing. His ringing endorsement of user-created innovation is in many ways a continuation of those positions.


I haven't read the book yet, so I can't comment on it intelligently. However, I think the thrust of this argument fits in nicely with the whole idea of user-generated content, which has become a driving force in today's Web 2.0 boom. And with Internet-based tools like Google to organize and manage a possible tyranny of too much innovation, the concept feels strong.


All this said, I think the best part of the article was discovering that Irving is writing a blog. I've always found his insights sage and valuable. He is one of the few people on my RSS subscription list; I'll be checking back regularly.

Technorati Tags: Democratizing Innovation, IBM, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Tyranny Of Too Much