Posted by mikezillion at March 2nd, 2008

I’ve been reading a book called Medici Effect about innovation, and it’s interesting to note how the desperation for reward can inhibit creativity:

“One group was told that they would receive a $5 reward if their solution time to the problem was in
the top quartile and $20 if their solution was the fastest. The second group did not get these instructions…. (The) group that had no chance of getting a reward solved the problem
significantly faster than the people who did.”

I think about how desperate companies in the porn industry are these days, as the paradigm shifts from expensive and exclusive content to free and commodity content. The point at which innovation is most valuable seems to be the point at which it is also the most inaccessible.

The Medici family spurred the Renaissance by bringing together experts and thinkers from a wide variety of fields, and offering them the opportunity to cross-pollinate their ideas. The concept of “renaissance man” doesn’t mean someone with a job and a hobby, but rather someone with broad expertise in many fields. However, the carelessness and sense of play which comes from having a hobby seems to be elemental to truly innovative thinking.

Success is a product of many, many failures. But there is no reward for failing multiple times in the same manner. Look how many companies are now trying to use the same formula to make money with porn. No matter how many of them fail, there is no innovation being generated if none of them tries something different.

Maybe I should start capitalizing the word Porn.