Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Saturday, August 13, 2005

The Zero-Intelligence Corporation (aka Peer Production Goes Meta)

So for the last couple of years I've been harping on about what I call the zero-intelligence corporation to my friends and mentors. Most of them are annoyed, because I haven't done a great job of articulating the concept.

Essentially, it's open-source business: a corporate form without managers, C-level dudes, or know-it-all strategists like yours truly. How can such a form exist? Well, essentially because hyperefficient info-sharing mechanisms can make coordination almost costless (which is why all of the aforementioned exist, in the first place; see my peer production ppt for more).

The standard academic answer to my simple argument is that strong complementarities exist between value activities, and the isolated workers that are assigned those activities can never identify and exploit them properly. Presumably, because managers are smarter (Yeah, I always thought this was a specious line of reasoning as well).

Anyways, it looks like [email protected] has decided to launch the Business Experiment, which is possibly the first really truly zero-intelligence play. I think this is immensely interesting, so I will be watching closely.

-- umair // 8:40 AM // 2 comments

Comments:

I came across this business experiment a few days, it is very very intresting. The idea of a zero intelligence that you are talking about is making a lot of sense to me now, did not understand it well when you posted about it a year ago (But now after 2 years time I understand a lot of what you say :) )
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2004/06/zero-intelligence-one-of-other.cfm

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Rajan // 5:49 AM

very interesting ppt on peer production... so here's a question, how do you fairly/adequately determine compensation/value for the mico-chunks that earch participant contributes?

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Anonymous // 3:20 AM