Abstract
Ilkka Tuomi's book is about the nature of innovation in our modern world. Tuomi's imagination is sparked particularly by the development of Linux. He begins his work by stating that user surveys rate Linux to be the best computer operating system available. The relevance of the Linux phenomenon for Tuomi is that it embodies the idea of a globally networked innovation process and reflects the essence of the so-called ‘new economy’. Instead of traditional economic competition, the Linux initiative relies on symbiotic relationships and on the willingness of self-organizing developer communities to collaborate without hierarchy. Tuomi sees the open source model which underlies this development process as a kind of ideal-type. His aim is to use this model to challenge the stranglehold many conventional assumptions tend to place on our understanding of innovation and technological change.
The traditional way of theorizing innovation, Tuomi argues, is full of mystery and black boxes. It is ‘upstream’ and linear in its approach and it treats innovation as something happening ‘out there’ in a world of objects. For him, the Linux initiative triggers a realization and a belief that all innovation is social innovation. Internet related innovation demonstrates to the extreme that even seemingly trivial individual effort may lead to high-quality collective production of change. If we want to understand innovation today, he argues, we must focus on the ‘downstream’ where communication and change takes place.
Tuomi makes two further claims. First, traditional models of innovation are not only misleading. They will become increasingly so as the new economy develops. Central to this notion is the idea that by way of the internet, innovative processes become more visible and are recorded in greater detail. This results in the expansion of the opportunities for critical reflection. Second, the significance of the model gleaned from the Linux initiative extends beyond the realm of software programming projects to all innovation processes based on peer-review, incremental development, and spatially distributed collaboration. According to Tuomi, the study of internet related innovations like Linux, the World Wide Web, email and the internet itself, has practical implications. He claims that it provides us with a better understanding of product development and helps us organize for innovation.
It appears positive for Tuomi to see innovation as a fundamentally social development. Likewise we might celebrate when he emphasizes that the meaning of technology, together with its meaningful use, are grounded in social contexts. In many ways he is right to appreciate the internet as a medium that reconfigures the nature of innovation. However, I do have reservations about two of his theoretical accounts.
First, Tuomi's account of traditional innovation theory is rather narrow and stated a bit too forcibly for my liking. He more or less suggests that the advent of internet related innovation and the new economy signals the break between the traditional and the new way of theorizing change. His account is all the more confusing because the reader is left with the impression that while traditional innovation theory is inherently flawed, it captures something of the reality of innovation pre-dating the internet. The difficulty with Tuomi's account of traditional innovation theory is that it allows him to shy away from questioning the break between new media and pre-existing social and cultural forms of innovation. As such, he loses the opportunity to consider the ways that internet related innovation might also be radicalizing the consequences of modern innovation processes and making them more universal than ever before.
Second, Tuomi's theoretical model for thinking about collaborative and participatory innovation is overly positive and does not properly reflect his rich and interesting account of the Linux initiative. He successfully calls our attention to the importance of social communication and the role of communication media in innovation. However, his theoretical model of globally networked developer communities seems to assume that innovation develops through people collaborating and communicating freely in a non hierarchical process which, in principle, is open to all. The critical theoretical considerations that need to be addressed here can be easily demonstrated as flowing from his claim that seemingly trivial individual effort may lead to high-quality collective production of change. Well it may or it may not. Trivial individual effort can have all kinds of unintended consequences and some of these will be particularly unpleasant. A positive outcome for such a process calls for a more sophisticated critical theoretical reflection. First, while the internet provides the means for creating new forms of interaction, any suggestion of a conversational relationship on a large scale is an illusion and is impractical. Second, a ‘come-and-go-whenever-you-please’ attitude has never led to the successful formation of practice-related community. Third, without some kind of balance between individual freedoms and responsibilities that go beyond individual needs, any sense of innovative development will soon evaporate. Fourth, the leveling up of authorities in innovation processes could quite easily prove dangerous and open up possibilities for tyranny and conflict rather than productive self-organization. Tuomi does not really discuss these theoretical challenges to his empirical material. He merely concludes that: ‘The great paradox of Linux is that although its developer community subscribes to the core values of modernity, at the same time its social structure resembles a medieval village’ (pp. 213–214). Continuing in the same way he claims that ‘Internet-related innovations are interesting as they show how multiple interests can be combined so that everybody is better off at the end of the day’ (p. 220).
In the book's introduction, Tuomi does warn the reader to expect some controversial theoretical claims. The insightful and interesting empirical detail in subsequent chapters does not make his theoretical claims less controversial, as Tuomi hopes, but is far more successful in documenting the political and economic realities of innovation today. In this respect, his work is unquestionably highly significant.