October 30, 2010 Innovation: It Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right By STEVEN JOHNSON AUTHORS quickly find a certain predictability to many of the questions they encounter on a book tour. But a few weeks ago, during the second stop on the tour for my new book <http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781594487712,00.html?Wher...>, I found myself being interviewed in front of a Seattle audience and responding to an opening question that I had never been asked before: “Are you a Communist?” The question was intended as a joke, but like the best jokes, it played on the edges of an important and uncomfortable truth. I had just spent four years writing a book about the innovative power of open systems that work outside of or parallel to traditional market environments: the amateur scientists of the Enlightenment, university research labs, open source software platforms. In my research, I analyzed 300 of the most influential innovations in science, commerce and technology — from the discovery of vacuums to the vacuum tube to the vacuum cleaner — and put the innovators of each breakthrough into one of four quadrants. First, there is the classic solo entrepreneur, protecting innovations in order to benefit from them financially; then the amateur individual, exploring and inventing for the love of it. Then there are the private corporations collaborating on ideas while simultaneously competing with one another. And then there is what I call the “fourth quadrant”: the space of collaborative, nonproprietary innovation, exemplified in recent years by the Internet and the Web, two groundbreaking innovations not owned by anyone. [...] Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/31every.html