Why Facebook Town Hall Shows Obama is Missing the Point on Innovation
Yesterday’s Town Hall meeting at Facebook produced one big surprise – the tepid questioning fired at President Obama from America’s tech elite.
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[Instead of Obama and Facebook look to Don Tapscott and collective intelligence…]
Tapscott’s take on the current state of the economy?
Innovation is just tinkering. The problems go much deeper. In Macrowikinomics he argues, for example, that the auto-industry’s inability to innovate fundamentally is why America is embroiled in Iraq. And he says the pharmaceutical industry is about to fall off a cliff as patent protected revenues disappear in the next few years. We need a Linux for the pharma sector. On energy: “If Edison came back today he’d recognise the grid as an old industrial age grid.”
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Tapscott’s view of the economy is pretty comprehensive – autos, energy, pharmaceuticals were just the start of our conversation. A lot of his commentary is a negative take on how we do things. And his answers are a little one-sided – we need to move to a new paradigm, mass collaboration. But there’s a huge amount of sense in what I see as his central message. It’s time to own up on how inefficient many of our systems and processes are. And how interconnected the failings.
Phi Beta Iota: Inefficiency is a form of corruption. Integrity eliminates inefficiency because integrity embraces clarity, diversity, and constant innovation in the face of constant recognition of truthful feedback. Hence, the West generally and the USA specifically is doubly-corrupt: corrupt in government, which has become a bloated patronage system for special interests, borrowing one third of its annual budget “in our name;” and corrupt in industry, which has been allowed to commit virtual suicide “in our name” by being allowed to waste resources, over-charge for unneeded products and services, and so on. As this web site has emphasized, deep information is paradigmatic. Obama is still working on multiple failed paradigms across the twelve policy domains in the Strategic Analytic Model.
