American Chronicle | Ideas: Q&A

"The Initiative for Open Innovation, or IOI, was designed to be a truly open global initiative to change how problem solving is done and by whom. Let me explain it with a metaphor. In the first several thousand years of human economic development, almost all progress was made by moving physical material from one place to another. Global trade drove the development of civilization. The big problem with moving stuf across space is the space. The biggest risk was that you would hit a reef and lose your ship, or run across a hostile tribe and lose your caravan. So the single biggest tool for risk mitigation that made economics work was the map. Cartography, the ability to map our physical environment, was the single most important breakthrough in economic development. In the 1400s and 1500s, the great maritime empires of Portugal and Spain dominated global trade because they dominated mapmaking. No one else knew how to make the long-distance passages. The Portuguese and Spanish kept it as a trade secret. In the biggest act of open access guerilla warfare ever done, in 1596 a Dutchman named Jan Huygen van Linschoten stole all the Portolan charts and navigation directions from the Portuguese and published them in Amsterdam. Within a few years the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company were formed, and the entire landscape of commerce changed. It is unthinkable now that we would have trade in the absence of maps as global public goods. Yet that is the situation we face in today's information economy, the lack of publicly available maps. Indeed. And that is exactly the transition we now have to make in the world of ideas. Today it's not about moving stuf from one place to another; it's about converting information through thought processes and creative innovation into new value. It's the world of ideas rather than the world of things. But we have the same challenge of cartography. We need to create publicly available maps that can help us navigate this new world of information. We need to create as global public goods, a risk mitigation tool so that decisions that are aligned with self-interest and ambition can be made with as little avoidable risk as possible. Right now, the greatest risks are associated with intellectual property, regulatory compliance, and, of course, ignorance. Those can be reduced...."