Throughout history, many valuable innovations have come not from a sole inventor tinkering away in his garage or laboratory but from the collective efforts of a team of people. Often the individuals in these groups are motivated by their devotion to an idea and to the collaborative process of working with others toward a common goal, knowing that their reward might be nothing more than the positive feelings that success breeds. They set out initially not with the thought of realizing a financial gain but rather to meet a challenge or solve a problem, and the resulting collaboration typically benefits those involved and sometimes even society as a whole. The swarming of bees is an archetype of this concept.1 With no central direction, bees self-organize to build nests, feed and nurture offspring, gather food and even decide on their next queen. Similarly, groups of humans swarming together for a common purpose can constitute a powerful collective mindset that unleashes tremendous creativity, spurring exciting and valuable innovations.
The famous example here is the development of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, often credited as the father of the Web, and the countless others who worked on the effort were driven by an intrinsic motivation to tackle a technological challenge. If someone wanted to pursue a useful idea for extending the project — for... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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