There are (at least) two general approaches to creating something technically new. At least I think there are. One is externally oriented. The creator notices or is given a situation or problem that somebody else experiences, and the creator tries to come up with a technical solution. The other is internally oriented. The creator finds an aspect of technology inherently interesting and tries to come up with a something new to do with it.
At a very abstracted level, the first approach might be called “work” and the second “play.” I suspect most of the significantly original innovations in the tech world (not that there are really all that many) come from a combination.
Modern hierarchical organizations (like corporations, for example) emphasize specialization. The organization is regarded, loosely, as a kind of “machine,” because that’s the dominant narrative of our age. We reflexively regard what we observe as varieties of machines. With a reluctant nod to the villainous Margaret Thatcher, we may even think “there is no alternative.” There are many alternatives, of course; it can just be difficult for us to think of them. In other ages, and in other places today, people’s dominant narratives differ. Entities and events in the world have been (and are) regarded as outcomes from supernatural actors, manifestations of otherwise invisible forces (“energies,” “spirits”, etc) and other things harder for us to define.
My point is that specializing so that the “work” approach and the “play” approach are embodied in different people is an outcome of the hierarchical, mechanistic thinking underlying modern organizations. People can switch approaches, and I think they often do. There’s an easy way to demonstrate this, even without observing how you yourself might approach creative tasks. Just fire up YouTube and look for channels featuring “makers” — these are folks like Laura Kampf or Adam Savage or Simone Giertz — or countless others. They film their process and often vocalize their thinking, and sure enough, they swap back and forth from one approach to another often.
This is all to say that I think modern organizations have a structural deficiency: too much specialization and too much hierarchy.
This is just the anecdotal intro; I’ll have more to say in a more analytic way in the future.
