A recent Tweet from factoryjoe aka Chris Messina is worth putting up here.
It just dawned on me that startups are obsolete. Sustainable, distributed bursty work is the future.
The other day I blogged about the SourceForge Marketplace and a microeconomy developing around expert offerings. Chris takes the thought one step further. Is the future of web-based “startups” not a formal legal long running entity, but high value projects where you get together with a set of people, perhaps via a network of some sort (the “sustainable” is key in the above tweet)?
I am not completely sure. However as work gets increasingly distributed, and resources go into the cloud, I can see the forming of small distributed teams or individuals that come together on a project by project basis and the aforementioned economy developing around support services, workspaces, etc. The challenge is maintenance. Perhaps maintaining such systems and products will become an industry of its own (more reason for standards).
As I was writing this post, FoundRead pointed me to a report on business technology trends from the McKinsey Quarterly. The report starts with the following
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
The trends in that list are exactly what we are talking about, including distributed cocreation, tapping into a world of talent, extracting value from interactions, and last but never the least for me, making business from information. The question, for me, remains. Are those of us in the business of science ready to embrace such a world? I do think there is a lot to be said about distributed expertise and being able to build value from distributed networks of people, especially in the software and informatics world, but as a field we are a long way from being successful.
So I pose the question, especially to those of you getting started in a bioinformatics/software oriented career. Would you like to work in a traditional environment or in the kinds of environments we are talking about here?
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11 Comments
So when are you coming to saturdayhouse or six hour startup ?
So when are you coming to saturdayhouse or six hour startup ?
http://www.saturdayhouse.org/
http://blog.sixhourstartup.com/
http://www.saturdayhouse.org/
http://blog.sixhourstartup.com/
If my coding skills were worthy, I’d be there in a heartbeat (esp for 6 hour startup). But, hopefully, this winter will get on track (I keep saying that
)
For science I think this “bursty work” is an excellent concept. To establish collaborations we are still very limited on the people around us in the institutes, the contacts we make in meetings or from our current/previous supervisors (real life stuff). I was just trying to set up a bioinformatics/evolution project in Google Code and in just a few weeks I got at least two other researchers interested in collaborating and a few others asking questions and correcting a few mistakes. I think trying out research ideas this way is very different from having a group leader thinking about a project and trying to sell it to the next PhD student or postdoc coming to the lab.
For science I think this “bursty work” is an excellent concept. To establish collaborations we are still very limited on the people around us in the institutes, the contacts we make in meetings or from our current/previous supervisors (real life stuff). I was just trying to set up a bioinformatics/evolution project in Google Code and in just a few weeks I got at least two other researchers interested in collaborating and a few others asking questions and correcting a few mistakes. I think trying out research ideas this way is very different from having a group leader thinking about a project and trying to sell it to the next PhD student or postdoc coming to the lab.
Absolutely. I am looking forward to seeing more scientists start these cool projects, especially when we have the tools now to run them in a very distributed way
Absolutely. I am looking forward to seeing more scientists start these cool projects, especially when we have the tools now to run them in a very distributed way
Bursty is a bonus, but it can fit on the balance sheet until you take in the cost of discovery, cooperation and coordination, to use Coase’s still helpful transaction theory.
Bursty is a bonus, but it can fit on the balance sheet until you take in the cost of discovery, cooperation and coordination, to use Coase's still helpful transaction theory.
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[...] The thoughts above tend to switch from academic research to early stage biotech, but I feel both suffer from complementary problems, problems that hinder innovation and cutting edge research, and the microfinance system described above provides a means for researchers and innovators to bring their ideas to fruition, either from a purely academic videopoint, or to commercialize a good idea. Do you think something like that is feasible? If not, why? I am not arguing to end current forms of funding, but to find alternatives, perhaps those that can be used by small groups of like minded scientists to perform Bursty Work. [...]
[...] Deepak wrote some time ago about “Bursty work” – idea, that work can be done by distributed teams focused around high value projects, instead of teams gathered around company/startup. That actually made me think if we can join these two ideas in science: to have ultra-productive and distributed team working on time-constrained project. [...]
[...] reading Monkchips Bursty Work The Scientific [...]
[...] the future of scientists). In spirit of freelancing they will jump from one project to another (see Deepak’s post about bursty work and follow-ups), developing solutions and making discoveries much faster (or cheaper) than it is [...]