How to Create an Idea Factory

One of the reasons why most BIG IDEAS go nowhere is because the idea originators do not have a team of collaborators on board to help develop and execute their ideas.

In the absence of collaborators, the idea originators either try to do everything themselves (not a good idea) or spend so much time trying to enroll people on the fly that the idea loses momentum and eventually evaporates.

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Birth pains of a digital library

Ever since the first bytes, the Internet has been seen as an opportunity to spread an unlimited amount of knowledge. For thousands of years, libraries have tried to complete such a task, and the development of information technology quite logically brought about the idea of digital knowledge storage. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, the occurring data layer touches the current world order in a way in which no-one has an integral picture of its ultimate impacts.
There are fewer and fewer physical obstacles in the way of information dissemination; technology develops and is becoming cheaper, and the biggest problem in spreading knowledge lies in its substantial value. As in certain cases, knowledge cannot be measured in terms of money; it is at times protected as eagerly as the Chinese governing class protected the silk-making secrets at the beginning of the first millennium. Where big distances and the protectionist way of life were of great help for the Chinese, now it is mostly copyright and patent legislation that must manage the protection of the spread of useful knowledge or application.

Copyright and patent acts are by nature contradictory. On the one hand, the efforts of each person and company must be worthily rewarded; on the other hand, there is a question of where we would have reached with our culture in the context of royalties? Even civilisation would have been different if a Sumer corporation had managed to patent the wheel. Society has been developing together with the spread of knowledge and the example of Mesopotamia is demagogic, but it characterises the incompatible nature of the problem. A pharmaceutical company invests billions of dollars in the preparation of medicines, which they would like to earn back. What is more important when millions of people die in Africa each year with no money for medicine but who could get help from generic drugs: the company’s right to receive a worthy reward for its work or the lives of humans? The world faces such choices every day and there are no easy solutions in the current organisation of the economy.