[p2p-research] big does not necessarily innovate: the current VC model is broken

[Paul D. Fernhout]

J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:31 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What outcome do you or J. Andrew want?
> 
> Speaking for myself, the outcome I want is a maximized rate of
> innovation, with an eye toward capital efficiency since that is a
> finite resource. Beyond that, I am pretty agnostic about how that
> happens.

Innovation towards what end? To whose benefit? Who pays the costs? At what 
risk? With what social vision in mind? And how are the benefits divided up 
socially? Etc.?

If you just want to make things like funky self-replicating space habitats 
that become so plentiful eating up asteroids that people can move into them 
for free, I'm all for that. :-)

> My arguments are pragmatic, not theoretical. The realities of various
> innovation funding mechanisms in different countries do not match up
> with the theory or widely-held beliefs regarding such mechanisms. In
> my view, we should be leveraging the real strengths of these various
> models rather than trying to leverage claimed theoretical strengths
> that don't match the practice. There is no single funding model for
> innovation that is efficient for every case in the context of the
> outcome I want.

I agree that they all have different implications. I'd suggest the basic 
income approach would be most "democratic" and the results would be most 
likely to make democracy stronger. For example, people would have a lot of 
time to create and examine open source voting machine code, rather than let 
one company dominate that field with proprietary code.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/