Innovation – New Ideas
Separately from my occasional work on Web Coherence, I’m involved with a number of other projects. One of those, that I’ve mentioned before, is VRM – Vendor Relationship Management – led out of the Berkman Centre at Harvard by Doc Searls.
Anyhow, what I find interesting is how ideas like these gain traction. I first came across VRM in the beginning of this year, and its been around in its current incarnation since 2006 or so, I believe. Not a whole lot of coverage had been devoted to it, outside of the interested in the media and blog sphere.
Then I see VRM, and the ideas it spreads, start popping up in other places, as illustrated by Doc’s post and others. I even see business models that have similar concepts. It was also heavily covered at a recent conference.
Doc is a far more eloquent speaker on the subject of VRM than I. What I wonder on seeing that is, how do potentially revolutionary ideas spread? Evangelism and quality, sure, but how do you create widespread distributed change in a repeatable, or at least manageable fashion? We are a far more complex and distributed society than we were during the revolts of history, or even the protests and rallies of the middle of last century. An immense amount of pressure needs to be exerted to influence the institutional forces of the world today – at least in a meaningful fashion.
Not saying it can’t be done. The effect of a good idea and persistent evangelism is enough to make an impact, as shown above. But the days of rallies and focal media channels are ending, and in the noise of a society where we all have a voice I have trouble seeing how to fight institutional forces. This is a problem when the powers-that-be – governments, corporations, cultures, and economic forces – may not be on the right track. Instead of a globalized world, are we turning into a highly fragmented, isolated world?
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In other news, if anyone else would like to get involved in the WebCoherence Project, let us know. Heeman has been busy at work, and far more of my writings and interests don’t fit into the ‘coherent behaviour’ framework. Interested in highlighting oddly synonymous behaviour on the web? Let us know.
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