On Greed and Innovation

Last week, Howard “Smart Mobs” Rheingold came to give a talk here at Made by Many. It was a fascinating look at how smart mobs have functioned when given tools that are largely outside the authorities’ control, and some future gazing on how these phenomena might evolve over the medium term.

I don’t want to talk about smart mobs here, but rather to focus on one, perhaps throwaway, line that Howard used:

“Greed helps innovation. Fear prevents it.”

Aside from the rather unpleasant echo of Gordon Gekko which turned my stomach a little, my first reaction was that this is mistaken. I’ve given it some more thought and I’m even more convinced that greed is not the prime motivating force for innovation.

Let’s get the semantics out of the way first. According to Wikipedia, greed is defined as follows:

Greed in psychology is an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth

Greed is excessive, selfish and a desire to possess more than one needs. To my ears, these things are all entirely negative. Greed is fundamentally different from the desire to make an honest living and behave as an equal member of society. Although it’s sometimes used lazily to be a synonym for money, this is an inaccurate usage. Let’s assume that Howard used the word in its accepted meaning.

In many ways, I think that greed and fear are fairly close relations rather than the opposites Howard makes them out to be. Greed is, at least to some extent, irrational. It’s a desire to possess more than one needs. What, other than fear, would make someone desire that?

There are countless greedy corporations who lead in their fields. Many of them were once innovative and disruptive small businesses, but outgrew their innovation to become monolithic enterprises. Nearly all of them seem to me to have completely stagnated and to have abandoned the idea of innovating. Their greed is such that they are afraid – just as Howard says – of innovating. They’re afraid that innovation will confuse their existing customers and, worst of all, make them seem frivolous. What other company than Apple could call a major product like Apple TV a “hobby“? (This is one of the main reasons I hope Apple doesn’t get too big. As a high-profile but small market share computer and phone business, they can still afford to be innovative. That will change if they ever really establish themselves as the darling of corporate IT departments.)

Let me provide some counter arguments. Take Martin Pilkington, a recently-graduated independent Mac developer who runs his own software business. He explicitly says that he does not see excessive financial reward as a goal. He does what he does because he loves programming for the Mac and wants to earn a fair living doing so.

The Mac indie scene is full of developers who just love writing code for their favourite platform. I met several aspiring indies at NSConference, a recent Mac Developers’ conference. These are, in the main, people who already have well paid jobs as developers in large companies, but they’re sick of being treated as a “resource”, as though sending a development job to the techies was like sending a dictaphone tape to the typing pool.

These people want to make a difference. They want to write software that people are profoundly happy to be using, that delights them. They want to make people’s lives better by providing them with great software, and they want to be able to do this without starving. The greedy path would be to stay in their comfortable job being ground down by their work and being continually frustrated in their attempts to do something they could be proud of. The innovative path is to find a way to build the software of their dreams, even if it isn’t as rewarding financially.

Loren Brichter is a wonderful example. He’s the developer of the popular Tweetie, a Twitter client for the Mac and iPhone. He used to work at Apple – a sweet job that many people would kill for – but became and indie developer to pursue his dream. Not a dream of infinite wealth, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs style, but to get to do things that his smallish audience would love.

He started out with Scribbles, a very innovative drawing application which, if you have a Mac, you should check out. I don’t know how many copies he sold, but it probably wasn’t that many. Then he released Tweetie for the iPhone. It was an almost instant success and is still, to my mind, the most polished iPhone app available. It’s so good that I like it more than nearly all of the built-in Apple apps. The desktop version is one of the best Mac apps I’ve ever used.

Brichter gave an interesting talk to the students on the Stanford iPhone course (which is available from iTunes U). He wasn’t motivated by greed, indeed he didn’t know if he’d sell any copies at all; after all, there were already several free and good-enough Twitter clients available in the App Store. He just wrote a Twitter client that he was proud of and hoped other people would like.

No, pace Howard Rheingold, I think that it is love that enables innovation. A fanatical kind of love, a love that might be unrequited, but love nevertheless.

Greed can sit alongside love, providing an additional motivation, but that greed, if it is in the ascendant, will prevent you from making the best thing you possibly could because the temptation to cash in will kick in before you’ve made the thing that you originally conceived, the thing that would be perfect. You’ll sell it to some corporation, or release it too early because the desire for the money is greater than the desire to innovate, or maybe you’ll cut corners because it’ll get you to your funding sooner.

Greed only gets you so far. For genuine innovation, you need love.