220
10 The Economy 4.0
Such an approach would produce considerable synergy effects. My colleagues
Didier Sornette and Thomas Maillart recently demonstrated that, by open collaboration, two people can produce software that would otherwise have required 2.5
developers (“1 + 1=2.5”).
44 Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt and I, together with
some others, discovered a similar pattern in cities: productivity that depends on social
interactions tends to disproportionately increase with population size.
45 For example,
a city with two million inhabitants would be about 20% more productive per 1 million
inhabitants than two cities of one million. This is probably the main reason for the
rapid and on-going urbanization of the world.
Interestingly, Internet forums of all kinds have nowadays created something
akin to virtual cities. Many citizen science projects (and also the famous Polymath
project on collaborative mathematics) underline that a crowd-based approach can
complement or even outperform classical research and development approaches.
46
Given the great advantages of collaboration, what are the main obstacles? A central
problem is the lack of incentives to share. Currently, researchers are motivated by
two kinds of rewards: they receive a basic salary and they earn the recognition by
their peers in the form of citations of their published work. For this reason, many
scientists do not share their ideas until they have been published.
Patents are a further obstacle to the sharing and widespread implementation of
good ideas. While patents are actually intended to stimulate research and development by protecting the commercial value of ideas, in the digital economy patents
seem to hinder innovation more than they foster it. It is as if everyone would own
a certain number of words and could charge others for using them—this would
certainly obstruct the exchange of ideas considerably.
However, it has recently become difficult to legally enforce hardware and software
patents, and there have been an increasing number of patent deals between competing
companies. The electric car company Tesla has even decided to allow others to use
their patents.
47 All this might indicate that a paradigm shift in terms of intellectual
property rights is just around the corner.
Moreover, it has become increasingly difficult to earn large amounts of money by
publishing music, movies or news. This is not just a problem of illegal downloads. In
contrast to material resources, information is becoming an abundant resource. Given
that every year, we produce as much data as in the entire history of humankind,
information will become increasingly cheaper.
44 Sornette et al. [15].
45 Bettencourt et al. [16].
46 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project, http://polymathprojects.org/, http://dl.acm.
org/citation.cfm?id=1979213.
47 Why Elon Musk just opened Tesla’s patents to his biggest rivals, see http://www.bloomberg.com/
bw/articles/2014-06-12/why-elon-musk-just-opened-teslas-patents-to-his-biggest-rivals.
10 The Economy 4.0
Such an approach would produce considerable synergy effects. My colleagues
Didier Sornette and Thomas Maillart recently demonstrated that, by open collaboration, two people can produce software that would otherwise have required 2.5
developers (“1 + 1=2.5”).
44 Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt and I, together with
some others, discovered a similar pattern in cities: productivity that depends on social
interactions tends to disproportionately increase with population size.
45 For example,
a city with two million inhabitants would be about 20% more productive per 1 million
inhabitants than two cities of one million. This is probably the main reason for the
rapid and on-going urbanization of the world.
Interestingly, Internet forums of all kinds have nowadays created something
akin to virtual cities. Many citizen science projects (and also the famous Polymath
project on collaborative mathematics) underline that a crowd-based approach can
complement or even outperform classical research and development approaches.
46
Given the great advantages of collaboration, what are the main obstacles? A central
problem is the lack of incentives to share. Currently, researchers are motivated by
two kinds of rewards: they receive a basic salary and they earn the recognition by
their peers in the form of citations of their published work. For this reason, many
scientists do not share their ideas until they have been published.
Patents are a further obstacle to the sharing and widespread implementation of
good ideas. While patents are actually intended to stimulate research and development by protecting the commercial value of ideas, in the digital economy patents
seem to hinder innovation more than they foster it. It is as if everyone would own
a certain number of words and could charge others for using them—this would
certainly obstruct the exchange of ideas considerably.
However, it has recently become difficult to legally enforce hardware and software
patents, and there have been an increasing number of patent deals between competing
companies. The electric car company Tesla has even decided to allow others to use
their patents.
47 All this might indicate that a paradigm shift in terms of intellectual
property rights is just around the corner.
Moreover, it has become increasingly difficult to earn large amounts of money by
publishing music, movies or news. This is not just a problem of illegal downloads. In
contrast to material resources, information is becoming an abundant resource. Given
that every year, we produce as much data as in the entire history of humankind,
information will become increasingly cheaper.
44 Sornette et al. [15].
45 Bettencourt et al. [16].
46 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project, http://polymathprojects.org/, http://dl.acm.
org/citation.cfm?id=1979213.
47 Why Elon Musk just opened Tesla’s patents to his biggest rivals, see http://www.bloomberg.com/
bw/articles/2014-06-12/why-elon-musk-just-opened-teslas-patents-to-his-biggest-rivals.