Joichi "Joi" Ito (born June 19, 1966) is a Japanese-American activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Director of the MIT Media Lab. Ito has received recognition for his
role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki and an IRC channel. Ito is a board member of Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a Senior Partner at PureTech and General Partner of Neoteny Labs.
Joi makes a few key points in his Ted talk about innovation in the age of the Internet:
Innovation is distributed, not centrally driven.
We see more innovation happening “in dorm rooms” rather than in large corporations, because it has become so low-cost to build new products and deploy them at scale. Examples: Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Snapchat. Not just happening in software: also happening in manufacturing, bio-engineering, etc.
Pull over push.
In the new world of innovation, what succeeds is “the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them, rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything.” In this world, innovators flexibly marshall resources from around the world—Joi noted his own example (“SafeCast”) of crowd-sourcing radiation measurement following the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Open source projects follow a similar model.
Compass over maps.
“The cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive, and it’s not very accurate or useful.” Referencing the same SafeCast project, Joi discussed how they knew they wanted to collect and publish radiation data, but didn’t now exactly how they would do it. “We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a strong compass, we were able to get where we wanted to go.” This approach to innovation argues that you should ship real products quickly, not knowing exactly how you get from A to B, as long as you know where you want to end up (B).
Joi sums it up by saying, “What you need to do is very simple. I think it’s about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, you need
to be so prepared. And focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.” Hence, he argues against being a “futurist”—and instead, being a “now-ist.”
His approach for innovation advocates:
Bottom-up instead of top-down innovation
Flexibility over planning
Sensing and learning over education and knowing
Access to networked resources instead of resource “ownership”
Shipping real product over creating presentations
Excellent lessons from an innovator who is the director of the MIT Media Lab, and who was an early investor in Internet companies like Flickr, SixApart and Twitter.
Via : www.medium.com