What is the motor of innovation?
I recently tripped over the phrase ‘motor of innovation’ while reading up on a rather quirky research papers. It got me thinking about how we could describe the motor of innovation in a broader sense.
Qualitative stigmergy, which is the true motor of innovation, can be seen as the basis of symbolic consciousness in the brain. It is exemplified on the web by a variety of collaborative, “open access” sites where people freely improve on each other’s contributions (Heylighen 2007).
I’m thinking ‘play’ could well be a general term for the underlying mechanism common to my experience with innovation to date and the seemingly aimless wanderings of social insects or seemingly random neural connections common to the study of ‘stigmergy‘. But I will need to think about that for a while, and discuss it with Andy and others first…
Fang - Mike Seyfang
March 31st, 2008 at 5:17 am
Termites build mounds to better the odds of survival. Is your motor of innovation something to do with bettering our own odds of survival?
Are blogs people’s stories of how they are the individual surviving the day-to-day. Is the community of bloggers building links through comments enabling everyone to simultaneously building better ways of surviving the day-to-day and therefore secure a better future?
We all listen to each other’s stories. This prepares us for when we face such situations. We naturally seek the best stories and to tell better stories to improve our own chances of survival.
This is for an innate pursuit of life for the sake of life itself. Could that be the true motor of innovation?