[ih] Review: Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley"

[Eric Gade]

It might help to draw a distinction, as Alan Kay does in his lectures,
between innovation and invention. The former seems to mean "to make new"
something that already exists in some form, while the latter means making
something that has not ever existed before. Obviously the line between
these is not clear cut. But in my view something like the iPhone is very
clearly a case of innovation over invention.

Regarding PARC, my understanding from reading the historical literature is
that it's best to view what happened there as a kind of "last gasp" of the
ARPA research community. There were lots of ARPA project alumni there (some
two "academic generations" deep in ARPA research) and Bob Taylor helped run
the show in its prime.

It's not just big, risky sums of money. You need time and space to breathe.
I believe part of the PARC arrangement was there would be no corporate say
in what they were working on for the first five years or so.

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 11:19 PM, Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net>
wrote:

> Got a citation about big companies -- most work I've seen (e.g. the
> Innovator's Dilemma) suggests the reverse.
>
> Certainly what I've seen is that big companies specialize in squashing
> innovation.  Most inventive folks I know have a horror story or two or
> three or four.
>
> Craig
>
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 8:38 PM, Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The research on innovation very clearly shows that significant, game
>> changing inventions almost always come from big companies. The myth of two
>> dudes in a garage ignores the fact that it takes big money to take big
>> risks.
>>
>> Apple succeeded with the iPhone while Handspring and Nokia failed in
>> large part because of the music infrastructure the company had built around
>> the iPod, another second or third mover that succeeded where more ad hoc
>> MP3 players had failed.
>>
>> On Jul 3, 2018, at 6:39 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 7/2/2018 10:05 AM, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
>>
>> don’t know, I would count the iPhone as a “big invention”. It completely
>> changed mobile telephony and created the entire app market.
>>
>>
>>
>> The iPhone popularized a concept but was arguably not first-mover to it.
>>
>> I'm not sure whether this is entirely accurate, by my own experience
>> would give Handspring the credit for hitting the milestone, and General
>> Magic for establishing the target (with Newton being an odd form of
>> take-back by Apple, since GM was a spinoff.)
>>
>> The point is that for both examples, it took companies that were not
>> embedded in the main corporate culture (as indeed PARC was not).
>>
>> The momentum, immediacy and encrusted bureaucracy of essentially all
>> larger companies makes it exceedingly difficult for any of them to
>> start, nurture and protect a serious innovation environment.
>>
>> While there are exceptions sprinkled over time, they are only that.
>>
>> d/
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dave Crocker
>> Brandenburg InternetWorking
>> bbiw.net
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>>
>> —
>> Richard Bennett
>> High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org> Founder
>> Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator
>>
>> Internet Policy Consultant
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
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-- 
Eric
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