Dissonances between research and Innovation policies

Last Tuesday we had the opportunity to have Yochai Benkler (in the photo) in Barcelona, who together with Pankaj Ghemawat and Josephine Green contributed to the pressentation of the new Strategic Plan for Innovation in Catalonia 2009-2013.

Yochai was on the line of his TED presentation or his book "The Wealth of Networks", maybe stressing more how corporations try to play in the world of peer production by redefining its boundaries, by making them more permeable. This role of mix production systems is also one of my interests, especially in the case where they are mediated by technological platforms that facilitate or enable coordination.

However, what was more surprising was the big picture of the event. Out of the 3 speakers, two of them where focusing in one way or another on the role of users in innovation. In the case of Josephine Green from Philips, users as an input of the innovation process and the role of capturing user experience early on in innovation – a common set of practices that many label as Living Labs – and in the case of Benkler on User Innovation and peer production, where is the user the one that directly innovates without any mediation by designers or facilitators.

This picture sharply contrasts with the lack of support for user innovation in Europe and in general in the world. Although we must note that Living Labs – co-innovation with users in real life environments – where mentioned more than a couple of times in the presentation of the Catalan policies, policies supporting user involvement or user innovation are notably absent.

The importance of users and the societal climate in general in innovation is clearly being stressed more and more, and this is a domain where even if we know a few things, much work and research has to be done, especially in the softer areas like services, etc… However policies insist many times in forgetting this area while stressing high profile research, which nowadays is highly specialized and therefore many times very difficult to transfer in concrete innovations that could make an impact in a region (don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this is not an area that should be pursued, only that economic results are possibly situated in a long term horizon). This dissonance between policies and research is especially notorious when we address the Information Society, where policies are driven almost exclusively by connectivity.

This was not the only dissonance that was visible in the presentation. Probably the most notorious one was Ghemawat stressing the importance of going step by step in the internationalization process, building ties first with the neighbors where cultural differences are minimal and understanding is easy to build in contrast with innovation policies that almost always aim to connect SMEs with emergent economies like India or China.

Incorporating research into policies is always a process that takes time. Here in Europe we are witnessing how Open Innovation is becoming policy in the Nordic countries and to some extend in Netherlands and Belgium. Support for User Innovation is still mostly absent. Here in Catalonia the picture is even more mixed, with a mosaic of measures where is hard to find a clear concretion and assess how much financing is backing them. However, I must honestly say that there is some evident progress also in this area.  

The Mobile OS Market

These days we are reading in the news that Symbion is going Open Source. As you may recall this summer Nokia bought the UK based Symbian firm with the intention to go in the direction of open sourcing Symbion. The move made sense not only from the strategic point of view but also from the financial point of view because Nokia was the biggest contributor.

From the strategic point of view, the roots of this movement could be situated in the Innovation Jam that Nokia held two years ago and in the resulting decision to become a services company and the creation of OVI.

Symbian is going Open source in stages, beginning with a community open source EPL (Eclipse Public License) to go most of it open source on 2010. EPL is a weak copyleft license that allows to have linkages with proprietary modules.

However, this provides us with an excellent opportunity to take a look at the resulting OS landscape.  

On one side we have Apple that is using its technological platform to align developers to its strategy. Apple relies in the complete control of the end product, both software and hardware.

We also have Windows Mobile, that sells the OS to integrators and is also trying, clearly less successfully, to create a platform encompassing application and contents.

Google is the new kid in the game with Android. Android has an Apache 2.0 license allowing derived works to be commercialized and probably aims to capture value through the same ad based model that uses in its search engine.

And finally Symbian where most notably Nokia controls around 40% of the market and now is going Open Source.

The most obvious question is about the sustainability of the Windows Mobile offer when competing with 2 open source offers, backed by companies like Google and Nokia. Probably the only alternative could be to have such a huge difference in quality that it could compete with the perceived quality market leader (Apple). However this is against the best interest and the survival of a player like Nokia or against the growth of Android and in any case, because of the lack of tight integration in the product /strategy components looks unlikely. Therefore tough times ahead for Windows Mobile …

What about Apple? Apple is maintaining a market leader position that in that environment forces him to a frenetic rhythm of innovation. Apple can only take advantage of its complete control on product/strategy components by constantly pushing the product to its maximum possibilities, by being constantly in the fence. This is probably the reason why it bought PA Semi (ARM) in an attempt to not only gain exclusive access to hot technology but to secure a temporary competitive advantage.

However, there are two forces that go against Apple, the first is modularity. As the market matures, technology standardizes effectively reducing the level of complexity of a product and equaling the playing field. The second is the standardization of user needs. Look for example, to the way PCs evolved, they are now a mature technology with pretty standard and accepted user interfaces. Nobody wants a car with 5 wheels, even if possible …

Anyway, there is room left for innovation and being in the cutting edge is obviously profitable but demanding.

And Android – Symbian? Well, both aim to play in the peer production market, taking advantage of modularization and the innovation potentially created by a huge number of developers.

If you take a closer look you could recognize that we are assisting at the same duality than in PC’s OS: a company that controls all the components of the strategy and others who only controls part of it. However with a change: two big names want to play the role of integrators, Google and Nokia, this contrast with the actual situation in the desktop (not so much in servers where IBM plays partially this role) and one of them also produces hardware.

 If you don’t control a majority of your strategy components you will perform very well when complexity is low but you could be easily beaten by the best integrated player (although as an average the whole group of innovators will perform better). However, as you increase the number of players upon you select for integration, the chances of the integrated player are being reduced (note that you still need an integrator who selects among the best – not the case of desktop linux).

We are therefore, confronting a new scenario, with new possibilities. My prediction: very tough times for Microsoft and harder to compete for Apple, Android and Symbion, do really have a chance. In terms of strategy we are going to witness peer production with lead integrators that I believe are going to play a role more as orchestrators of the platform than just integrators. The key issue for them will be their ability to capture the attention of a sizeable community of developers and have a system with enough modularity and granularity to allow peer production (Android’s architecture seems indeed to go in that direction).

A related, but not less interesting question, is to what extend a success in the mobile area could be translated to the desktop/laptop arena. 

P.S. This is part of our ongoing research with Prof. Ramon Casadesús 

Market Failure

It will be difficult to find a confrontation between economic principles and reality as dramatic as the one that we are witnessing.

And precisely this striking evidence is what Alan Greenspan admitted on a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

In his own words:

Mr. Alan Greenspan: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,”

Mr. Waxman: “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,”.

Mr. Greenspan: “Absolutely, precisely. You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Is difficult to find a better evidence of how far neo-liberal economic assumptions on market auto-regulation, are from explaining the realities of markets and economic behavior in times of crisis. This is nothing so new ... in any crisis we know that markets go mad and explode. However, here it is again, or as Galileo said – e pur si muove.

Amazon Web Services ?

Today Amazon Web Services is out of beta and into full production. And entered into full production with its latest offering of SqlServer and Windows in the cloud. Together with Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services are the two major offers for cloud computing and they are directed to a very different target audience. While the Google offering is more directed to a developer community that programs in phyton and C, the Amazon offering is devoted to business in general and with the incorporation of the Microsoft offer to the ones that want to experiment with cloud computing by porting existing applications. I think it is increasingly clear that in a world where software applications will be dependent on a constant on high quality connection, cloud computing is the way to go. Also is pretty obvious the fact that companies like Google or Amazon, with a first quality proven infrastructure, will aim to leverage this advantage well beyond its internal use. However these offers have implications well beyond its bet on capturing a new and emergent market. Until now infrastructure, the capacity to build and sustain it, has been a major barrier for developing any Internet offering. Just remember for the sake of the example all complaints about the lack of scalability of ruby on rails a year ago or so. By removing this barrier and transforming infrastructure into a commodity, not only a new market is captured, but also an important barrier for innovation is being removed. This is a tendency that is happening not only in computing, our friend Vicente Guallart the sould behind Fab Lab Barcelona presents us with the same argument, this time in fabrication and more in its early stages, but in fact, the same concept. As Michel Bauwens will say, this is one step more and one obstacle less to empowering users into a non-market, distributed system of production or a peer system of production, whatever you want to put it … Therefore, maybe is not about cloud computing after all …

Linkedin Surveys

Not content with raising $22.7 million in venture capital, Linkedin today unvelieved Linkedin surveys.

Linkedin surveys aims to capture value from the 30 million Linkedin user base with an average age of 41 and an average income of $110,000 by means of providing access to it to companies that want to target either a specific group of professionals or the whole community.

I think this move has two interesting facets. On one side is a significant departure from the ad based indirect model of monetization that Social Networks commonly use and on the other side is a first attempt to capture the insights and knowledge in this community.

I hope that Linkedin is thinking on both aspects and not only the first, because even if the first is clearly a more direct way to immediately increase revenue providing sustainability to the site, the one that is really worth to pursue is the second one.

We all know that one of the mechanisms that drive peer production of any information good is reputation. Reputation is not the solely mechanism but is an important one, especially for the ones that contribute more, the ones that are responsible for at least half of the contributions. In fact, Linkedin is probably the best positioned site to extensively use this mechanism, an attempt has been Linkedin answers, honestly not a very successful one …

Please keep trying!  

Wine Library - Vino y Web 2.0

Fast Company este mes contiene un artículo titulado "Selling Wine the Web 2.0 Way" sobre Wine Library, un ejemplo fantástico de como cosas que parecian dificiles de conseguir, lease vender vino por Internet, son no solamente posibles sino que producen pingues beneficios y la sensación de estar transformando una industria.

El formato es muy video, muy youtube, añadiendo todos los elementos web 2.0 y creando comunidad.

Predominan los californianos y franceses, pero también muchos italianos, portugueses y españoles (pocos catalanes :-( ), echale una hojeada ...

Today Android is Open Source. Why does it matter?

Today Google released Android as Open Source and you may think it matters because of the ecosystem of applications that could flourish around it, because that way Google may establish Android as a platform that players could use as a basis for growth pushing that way Google’s and Android’s growth and … of course you may be right and I won’t disagree with you.

However, I think there is more. Since when we have been talking of the internet of things?, of an internet of devices permanently connected? Probably more than five years …

The problem with this Internet has always been twofold, on one side the network, but on the other having an operating system that was small enough, regularly updated and able to connect to everything following known user interfaces.

Something that you can easily fit in a vacuum cleaner, a fridge, a tv set or whatever you can imagine. Of course developing all that for a vacuum cleaner is just toooo much (unless is Roomba … of course). But now is there, ready to use, with a well known user interface that can connect to everywhere …

My guess is that, Android today is about mobile phones, but tomorrow will be about whatever users decide it to be !!

--- 

Just one day after I wrote that Wind River announced that the company will offer Android embedded systems. I thought it will be fast ... but not that fast :-)

The end of the Orthodoxy …

Just a few months ago we were convinced that we knew a few things. Nobody, even in his wildest dreams will ever think that the American government could nationalize the financial system or part of it. Companies were responsible for experimenting in the market; they bear the risks and the rewards of their endeavor.

All that, has suddenly finished.

 The same happened in Innovation. If a sector was badly bleeding, the hopes were on the same market to restore its integrity.  This way, America has lost one sector after the other against other nations that were investing enormous sums of money targeting technologies in the best of cases and market opportunities in others. However, sentences like “industrial policy” were clearly outside the orthodoxy. We have seen how, because of this type of policy, American companies were progressively focusing in the short term, research and production were shipped abroad and companies were doing mostly marketing and innovation in America.

However, that was yesterday … Hopefully in a few months America will have a democrat for president and in control of the Senate. A democrat that has a strong support in the technology sector and aims for objectives as high as ending the dependency from petrol. And, for the first time in many decades, free to experiment, free from the orthodoxy.

Looking back at Europe, we can witness the results of our tries to imitate Silicon Valley. Lots of money poured in reproducing conditions and closeness in the hope of getting similar results. Most of the times results were mixed to say the least. Venture capital was not readily available, opportunities lacked the size to spur and ignite entrepreneurs, technology was just not there … Most of the times we have a body that tries to resemble but lacks the soul.

However, there have been deviations from these types of policies. We are all familiar from the deviations coming from the East, the conglomerates from Japan or Korea or the “let 1000 flowers flourish” experimentation of Chinese. In Europe there were many too, among them the long tradition on collaboration and setting objectives together of Germans or Finish.

I don’t think that nobody can believe that after such an intervention in the financial sector, Detroit will be approached in a way similar to the one in the past. Or, opportunities in solar energy and batteries won’t be pursued with a long term vision. Yes, obviously things will change in Innovation policy and will probably change fast.

Nobody knows the way, however if you want some clues, in my opinion we should look at operations like the one of AMD in Germany or if you want something closer to America … just look at the AMD operation in Albany. In fact, the brightest period for Innovation in America was the one just after the war, fueled by the arms race and a world of opportunities and optimism. And, this period was one of huge State intervention in concrete programs and even in concrete industries.

Of course, many things have changed and lessons learned then don’t apply in a world where Information Technologies have changed so many things, but probably some of the main vectors of that period are at least worth to examine.

We are certainly entering a period of pragmatism, a period without orthodoxy and this will unleash many possibilities that were, until now, not even explored. This will be good for America and we could see there a new gold era, this will be also good for the European countries that were trying to conduct innovation in ways that didn’t fit with the “laissez faire” paradigm. And this will be also good for countries like Spain, where the old paradigm never fitted, however these ones … will have to … innovate more.

“No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat”

Deng Xiao Ping   

Internet is not alienating … just the contrary!

These days we got the results of the last Pew survey and the results speak loud and clear.

Internet is not alienating social relationships, just the contrary. 

The ones that like history know that when the phone was invented some voices were there to claim that this was the end of face to face communication and a similar thing happened with the invention of music recording, some forecast the end of music. Well, not only nothing of that kind happened but humanity got more together than before with a renew conscience of itself.

A similar thing is happening with Internet. New ways of collaboration and new ways of communication are appearing. However not without consequences, sometimes dramatic and especially for the old ones …

En el futuro ... todos calvos ... y todos muertos!

¿Qué hacer?. Esta es una pregunta eterna que probablemente resuena con más fuerza en tiempos de crisis e incertidumbre. Quisiera hacer mi humilde contribución a responderla y animaros a co-crear esta respuesta.

Los tiempos de crisis  y mudanza tienen algo bueno: son tiempos propicios al cambio. Esta es una oportunidad, muchas veces única, que está en nuestras manos aprovecharla o simplemente echarla por la borda.

El cambio es a veces forzado, a veces las sociedades se ven abocadas a situaciones límite en las que quieran o no deben cambiar (pensemos en Islandia por ejemplo), pero muchas veces el cambio es evitable, muchas veces pensamos que si aguantamos el tiempo suficiente esto pasará. Dejadme citar a John Maynard Keyes, una cita que últimamente se ha vuelto a poner de moda:

“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, to useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

Si, en el futuro … todos calvos y todos muertos.

Quizás el escenario esté difuso pero sabemos algunas de sus coordenadas.

1. Sabemos que con el nivel de inglés de nuestra población nuestro país no tiene futuro.
2. Sabemos que tenemos un problema grave en la educación. Un problema de resultados, un problema de integración, un problema de consideración social de los enseñantes, … un problema que no podemos obviar.
3. Sabemos que nuestro modelo económico que sólo es capaz de generar empleos inestables y de baja cualificación porque en vez de estar basado en la innovación y el valor añadido está basado en el tocho, etc… no solamente no funciona sino que es moral y socialmente devastador.
4. Sabemos que aunque hemos mejorado en investigación, nuestra capacidad de transformar estos resultados en valor, en empresas, en productos, servicios, etc… es muy baja. En definitiva nuestras inversiones en ciencia y tecnología no nos están sirviendo para mejorar nuestro nivel social.
5. ...

También hay un cierto consenso en muchas de las soluciones. 

1)      La importancia del esfuerzo y la exigencia en temas educativos y cómo abordar la integración.

2)      Que por el hecho de colocar físicamente cercanas un conjunto de empresas y universidades nada maravilloso pasa, que hay que hacer mucho más y que este mucho más está en la línea de cómo fomentar la colaboración y estructuras que aprovechen la larga cola de posibles contribuciones.

3)      La importancia de los prototipos públicos en entornos reales para evitar que los programas de transferencia se conviertan en subvenciones sin resultados palpables.

4)      La necesidad de aumentar la tasa de riesgo que nuestra sociedad acepta e incrementar los fondos de Venture Capital disponibles.

5)      La necesidad de crear o atraer talento hacia posiciones de ingeniería.

6)      …

Pero probablemente el mayor problema al que debemos enfrentarnos no es el del diagnostico ni incluso el de las soluciones sino nuestra voluntad de cambio real, tanto de nuestra sociedad como de nuestros políticos.

Hace unos dias en una pequeña entrevista tuve la oportunidad de intercambiar unas palabras con la periodista. Hablamos de la crisis financiera, claro. Ella me comentó: "Si todos sabíamos que ibamos cuesta abajo en una bicicleta sin frenos". Francamente quedé sorprendido de la claridad de sus ideas y la potencia de la imagen que proponia. Una muestra más que el problema ni es ni ha sido el diagnóstico ni el consenso social sobre el mismo: sabemos lo que nos pasa y lo sabemos muy bien.

El presidente Bush decía ayer : “In the long run, the American people can have confidence that our economy will bounce back”. Bien, ese es el peligro. Yo creo que muchos de nuestros políticos , empresarios y en definitiva muchos de nosotros, no estamos tan lejos de esta línea de pensamiento y esta línea de pensamiento no nos llevará a otro sitio que al fracaso porque en el futuro ... todos calvos y todos muertos.

El auténtico peligro de esta crisis es pensar que se trata de capear el temporal, de esperar que el tiempo pase y los mercados se calmen y todo vuelva a ser como antes. Esto es especialmente cierto en paises como Catalunya o España en donde se justapone una crisis de modelo a la crisis del sistema financiero. No, todo no va a ser como antes.

Las crisis son oportunidades de cambio y de progreso, pero para eso hay que aprovecharlas.

¿Quién era Milton Friedman?

Este es el título de una de estas joyas con las que Paul Krugman (en la foto de la izquierda)– el reciente premio Nobel de economía – nos regala en el NYTimes y que posteriormente El País nos lo ofrece en versión traducida.

Una buena manera de acercarse al pensamiento de Krugman es a través de su blog http://www.krugman.blogs.nytimes.com y por supuesto a través de sus colaboraciones en el NyTimes.

En esta ocasión incluyo el link de El País porque no he podido encontrar el artículo en el NyTimes (igual lo publican después …). Es probablemente el mejor artículo que he leído que nos puede ayudar a entender en el contexto actual la imbricación entre el pensamiento económico, la política económica y el resultado de todo ello para los ciudadanos.

Sin embargo, en esta maravillosa discusión sobre el papel del Estado en la economía, sobre las virtudes y defectos de esta mano invisible que finalmente gobierna los sueños y realidades de generaciones enteras, se encuentran a faltar aspectos importantes que si bien no eran tan relevantes en décadas anteriores, ahora se revelan primordiales.

Creo que hoy en día la inmensa mayoría coincidimos con Krugman en que los mercados, sin duda nuestra mejor creación como herramienta de coordinación económica, deben ser diseñados para que cumplan realmente no solamente con su función de coordinación sino que también garanticen su utilidad social. En este contexto, encontrar normas que permitan aunar los intereses individuales en la dirección del bien común posibilitando una nivel de coordinación más elevado, es sin duda el reto. Un reto difícil, como muestra baste el hecho de que probablemente muchos instrumentos de innovación financiera creados en las últimas décadas alientan con claridad a situaciones contrarias.

Este no es un fenómeno nuevo, este tipo de problemas nos es lamentablemente familar, por ejemplo, en la crisis de la energía eléctrica en California que Krugman menciona y en tantas otras situaciones. Yo creo que aquí la inmensa mayoría está de acuerdo en que el diseño de incentivos y normas que permitan al mercado ser un instrumento real de coordinación y de bienestar social es absolutamente necesario y que mercados como el financiero deben reformarse urgentemente haciendo que sean todos y no sólo unos pocos los actores que estén sometidos a la regulación de las autoridades monetarias.

Sin embargo, creo yo que nos olvidamos de algo y de algo importante. Ese algo es la innovación. Es cierto que sabemos más bien poco del papel económico de la innovación y lo poco que sabemos es que nuestros intentos de repetir fenómenos como Silicon Valley mediante la creación artificial de clusters o estimular relaciones de transferencia mediante la puesta en marcha de proyectos públicos, funciona más bien poco y mal. A pesar de todo ello, en las últimas décadas estamos aprendiendo más de cómo apoyar a la creación de estructuras y condiciones que permitan que la innovación florezca con más facilidad. Tanto a nivel empresarial como a nivel de política global tenemos ejemplos de cómo algunas empresas y algunos países han logrado superar la situación de one-hit-wonders o pasar a ser sociedades punteras en innovación con el bienestar y calidad de vida que esto ha conllevado a sus ciudadanos.

Hace unas pocas semanas había en Business Week un artículo dedicado a Innovation Economics, un término nuevo para una nueva disciplina que poco a poco se va abriendo camino igual que otras como behavioral economics. 

Todos somos conscientes de la importancia de la innovación en la economía de este tiempo que nos ha tocado vivir. En los últimos años, hemos conseguido multiplicar en mucho lo que sabemos, y por lo tanto las combinaciones posibles capaces de solucionar un problema concreto han crecido exponencialmente, muchas de ellas desconocidas y por lo tanto potencialmente innovadoras. Este fenómeno junto con la globalización han creado este mundo donde el número de soluciones por descubrir, de innovaciones por crear, supera en mucho al de épocas pasadas.  

Es un hecho que muchos de los problemas con los que nos enfrentamos tanto nuestros países como nuestras empresas, simplemente no tienen solución con los activos existentes. Nadie creería que EEUU puede llegar nunca a equilibrar su balanza comercial o a pagar su deuda si no creyese simultáneamente en su capacidad para crear nuevos Google, nuevos Apple, nuevos Microsoft o en la capacidad de sus empresas de resurgir de sus cenizas con productos, servicios, modelos de negocio, mercados, … propuestas en general hasta ahora desconocidas.

Los mercados son sin duda importantes, su diseño (regulación si queremos visualizarlo en términos de política económica) es necesario, sin embargo debemos ser conscientes que ni son todo ni van a solucionar la totalidad del problema. El nivel de creación de riqueza que necesitamos no va a venir ya solamente de mercados estables y eficientes que proporcionen incentivos suficientes a los diferentes actores sino también de la capacidad de nuestras empresas y nuestros paises de ofrecer propuestas inéditas que generen mayor riqueza a un menor coste y con un mayor bienestar social: en definitiva de nuestra capacidad de innovar.

P.S. O por qué el PNV a pesar de todos los varapalos con el gobierno central acepta apoyar los presupuestos a cambio de la política de Innovación y que podemos aprender nosotros de todo esto.  

Urban Labs and Innovation

First of all I must apologize, I didn’t write in this 

blog for long (besides my problems with ebay). In fact I have been pretty busy in the past months because of teaching, speeches, research and projects.

I hope I will be able to write about some of this stuff soon, but today I would like to comment a bit Urban Labs.

I was invited to give a keynote speech in the first session of Urban Labs (http://www.urbanlabs.net)  that has been a very refreshing and engaging experience (thank a lot Vicens and Ramon!!).

It was really a pleasure to have the opportunity to engage in a conversation with so many friends coming from University, Open movements and Administration. However, the representation from companies was scare to say the least. This divide is characteristic from Spain – although much less in the Basque country – where industry still focus almost exclusively to the most traditional business models. There is a huge contrast with for example in North Europe where many times you find together people from companies and Open Movements and where mix models are more prevalent.

One of the enlightening surprises of the conference was how well known and well understood the Open Innovation ideas are. Of course, one could argue that after all we are talking about ideas that are more than half a decade old and that they are now entering into the “airport bookstore” level in the food chain. All this is obviously true, however I doubt that we can find the same level of understanding on the mechanics and motivation that drives Open Source or Open Platforms in the Spanish Business community, ideas that came from the same period if not older.

Also refreshing was the interest on new organizational structures and mix environments coming from the people working in the Administration. We don’t have yet a wide translation of coordination activities engrained into platforms, p2p production or Open movements in Administration and this is clearly an opportunity that must be taken. Still in Administration the coordination process is carried out by a management structure, effectively limiting participation, unnecessarily enlarging management, dividing citizens between the ones who manage and the ones who are managed and preventing contributions from the normal citizens that are not “professionals”. Administrations have a lot to learn from organizations like Amazon or Lego in ways to involve citizens and platforms that can carry on coordination in an open way. Finding people in the administration with the ambition to explore all that was certainly refreshing.

Also it was very nice the opportunity to talk lengthy with Michel Bauwens (http://www.p2pfoundation.net ) about p2p coordination models and their implications for innovation.

Congratulations to everybody for an event that situated the discussion beyond the repetition of what is already public domain and dare to explore novel approaches and new territories !!!! Companies – please put this event into your agendas, these are ideas worth to be incorporated as people like P&G, Amazon, Lego, IBM and many others show us on a daily basis.