I am getting back into the swing of things at work. These are interesting times that we live in. Exciting, complicated times. Lot's of decisions to make over the coming weeks.
I have mainly been contemplating market competition. Truth be told, I am not a competitive person (in a typical sense). I use to be... in high school... but college sort of took it out of me. I also managed to read a book that really had an impact on me called NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny which caused me to see competition and cooperation in a different way.
My friend Kevin linked me to an article the other day called The Awesomeness Manifesto:
Innovation: it's the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong.
I'd like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.
Let's face it. "Innovation" feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation — that innovation needs innovation. Why? When we examine the economics of innovation, three reasons emerge.
The article goes on to explain why "Awesome" is the new innovation... and as I read it, I find it has roots in the non-zero way that we can think of markets.
In short, the way I think of competition:
We should be trying to enable markets to be more valuable instead of destroying markets for the sake of other markets.
Given that I work in the gaming space, the commercial question to myself is, how do we expand the commercial success of the gaming industry by using the tools available to us: Content, data, relevance, experience, technology, creativity?
But at the larger level, what other markets are ripe for enabling? Given that my family just went through a personal tragedy, I find myself directly plugged into the tragedy that is happening all over the world. Why did I have to experience tragedy to feel connected to something that already existed in the first place? Is there an enabling way to bring that connectedness to others without them having to actually experience a loss? In this case enabling the support and charity markets of the world.
I stand at a personally interesting cross roads, working in an industry that is ready to embrace technology to make everyone's experiences better. To connect people in relevant and repeatable ways that is good both for the consumer and the content creator. And I can't help but thinking about all the industries out there that could benefit from some of the patterns that I am seeing emerge.
It makes me excited to still be in technology.
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