A recent NY Times article, “The Invention Mob,” highlights recent trends toward “community-based innovation” or “collaborative crowdsourcing” as both a business model and an alternative approach to conventional, corporate, and costly in-house R&D for invention and innovation. As the article notes, such an approach is not a silver bullet and “clever invention does not equal market demand.” Still, it does significantly speed up the process and thereby reduce the cost of failure and increase the distribution of ideas. These are central themes in two recent IF discussion projects:
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, discovered the impact of germs on proper medical treatment and proposed that doctors scrub their hands before conducting any procedure. By implementing the then-innovative practice...
Harvesting what we already know about collaborative experiences and empowering groups to create collaborative guidelines Dear collaborative discussion friends, Welcome to the Collaborative Discussion Project Newsletter. In our first newsletter,...
Margot Stern was born in Chicago in 1941. She was five when her family moved to Memphis, and her experience growing up in a Jewish family in the Jim Crow...