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| Joi Ito |
It really literally, not jokingly, but literally are the people who are misfits, who can't fit in anywhere else.... What's interesting is, when you put this collection of misfits together, you get this really interesting capability.
That's Joi Ito, the new head of
MIT Media Lab, in an excellent
interview at Edge.org. Joi goes on to summarize the new state of innovation:
In the old days, you'd have to have an idea and then you'd write a proposal for a grant or a VC, and then you'd raise the money, you'd plan the thing, you would hire the people and build it. Today, what you do is you build the thing, you raise the money and then you figure out the plan and then you figure out the business model. It's completely the opposite, you don't have to ask permission to innovate anymore.
He then goes on to make what may be the key and most novel observation of the interview:
The pivot that we need to make at the Media Lab, and which is sort of happening at the student level already, is stop focusing on things and start focusing on the network. Stop focusing on individuals and start focusing on communities. Stop focusing on top-down and focus more on bottom-up. Stop focusing on single experts and start focusing on the Cloud. There's a bunch of fundamental changes that the Internet has brought to the nature of innovation, the nature of society.
