Generativity is one of the core concepts I keep coming back to. I think it’s at least as important as “sustainability” and we shouldn’t think about one without thinking about the other.
Recently I noticed Tim O’Reilly mention it with new (to me) associations in a TechCrunch post about Gov 2.0:
The government may build some applications using these APIs, but there’s an opportunity for private citizens and innovative companies to build new, unexpected applications. This is the phenomenon that Jonathan Zittrain refers to as “generativity“, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not envisioned by their creators.
I looked into it and it turns out that Zittrain wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review (thankfully not gated) in 2006 called “The Generative Internet” [pdf]:
generativity increases with the ability of users to generate new, valu-
able uses that are easy to distribute and are in turn sources of further
innovation.
The key is that new innovations are unforeseen — or at least they aren’t the original intended purpose, but the original creation is open enough to allow for them to occur on their own. We can’t plan for everything; arguably, the best innovations tend to be unplanned, almost as a rule.
The internet itself is (as Zittrain suggested) probably the greatest example we have. More specifically, Twitter is another well known case… initially intended as an internal tool, then became the primary product, then users and application developers devised new functions, it evolved into a media and marketing platform, etc… this is what generativity means.
In general terms, the platform generates activity, the activity generates new functions, those functions generate even newer kinds of activity (and more of it), which generates new platforms, and on-and-on in virtuous cycles…
The Twitter phenom couldn’t have occurred if the original team had insisted on sticking to hard-headed plans for a perfectly designed product.
The problem we have now is that we haven’t fully developed the practices and vocabulary for institutionalizing this kind of innovation. Worse, the practices and vocabulary (not to mention mindsets) that we do have actually conspire against it. Our organizations don’t like uncertainty and ambiguity, and the structures of our organizations (starting early-on in the education system) tend to nurture intuitions that “certainty and control are good, uncertainty and ambiguity are bad… plan ahead… account for everything… stick to your guns… focus on the target…”
But we’ve seen ample evidence (e.g. the financial crisis) that certainty and control are illusions, and basing our plans and designs on those notions can be catastrophic. Meanwhile there’s evidence (e.g. the web) that a willingness to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity can accomplish great things.
The challenge is to bootstrap our mindsets and intuitions in a way that, instead of approaching the problem as, “how do we succeed despite uncertainty,” we simply take it for granted and are tacitly able to thrive in it — like learning to swim.
Figuring this out would be a very generative innovation in itself…
