 I am thrilled to bring to the stage to talk about his principles for innovation, to have a conversation about where the Media Lab is going, where innovation is going, my boss, Joey Ito. Thanks, Ethan. So you and John told me two different things to say, so I'll mix the two together. So welcome to the Media Lab. The Media Lab was founded next year. It'll be 30 years. So if you remember 30 years ago, while there was a rudimentary version of the Internet, it was mostly to connect supercomputers together. And it was before the Macintosh. It was sort of before we had social media, anything like that. So the Media Lab was very dedicated back then to empowering the individual. So a lot of taking these desktop CAD-CAM systems and putting it into personal computers, empowering the individual through sort of man-machine interface, coming up with things like multi-touch and Kindle and stuff like that. So the Media Lab has traditionally been kind of a human-computer interface and a rather sort of thing in software-oriented place. Nicholas famously wrote a book called Being Digital about how the world was turning digital, and we have the Center for Bits and Atoms. So that interface between bits and atoms was another thing about the lab. So roll forward 30 years. What's changed? What's changed is that we finished or at least had to make a lot of progress in empowering the individual, connecting the individual. And so now we have a network. And suddenly when you start looking at things as a network, you have to think about things as systems instead of objects. And it's less about empowering the individual and more about empowering the community. So suddenly the, by the Media Lab, my interpretation of Media Lab, media is plural for medium. And medium is something in which you can express yourself. And the expression in the past was things like hardware and displays and robots. But as the medium of what we're expressing ourselves in becomes society and the ecosystem and journalism, suddenly the work that we're doing, which is always very applied, looks much more like social science, like applied social science, things like journalism, and less like fiddling on with things on the screen. And so I think I would divide my life and I think divide the Media Lab's life into sort of two phases. There's before the internet, which I call BI, life was simple. Things were sort of relatively predictable. Economists were even sometimes able to predict things. And then there's after internet where life becomes extremely complex, unpredictable, and it's more about systems and it's more about how do you participate responsibly in a system that you can't predict and whose outcome to your intervention is really kind of almost random. And so that's sort of where we have the Media Lab. However, there's some core DNA at the Media Lab that's sort of stayed the same, which is we're very practice and build oriented. In the old days, Nicholas used to say in the old days, until recently they used to say here demo or die. Nicholas famously said the demo only has to work once because our main pathway to impact was getting big companies to see the demos and become inspired to build things like Guitar Hero or Mindstorms or whatever they would get inspired. Actually, a lot of the stuff in the original Macintosh came from things here. But today, now that the internet has happened, I've changed it to deploy or die, which is that we want our students and faculty to think about how we touch the real world directly. And let me describe a little bit about the dynamics of why I think that's more true than ever. So if you think about the internet, so the internet as a technology and as a set of protocols allowed hackers like me and others to build internet service providers is the first time an entrepreneur could compete with the telephone companies and connectivity. It was because of the open standards and we've been talking about internet being open, but the protocol of the internet itself is open so that me and a bunch of used hardware could create a point of presence and give access to people to connect to each other. And so suddenly, what used to cost thousands and thousands of dollars started to cost nearly zero because there was a forced diminishing of price as the competition drove the price to nearly zero. And what that means is the distribution cost, the collaboration cost, the communication cost went nearly to zero. This allowed things like free and open source software to completely dominate, especially in the backend space. That combined with Moore's law creates an extremely low cost of building a computer system. So before the internet, if you want to build a communication system, there were a lot back then, video tech systems like Minitel and Captain in Japan. You build the network, you build the hardware, you build the software, you build the system, you get the content. It cost billions of dollars to build these network systems. They took forever to construct and they didn't work. What happened now is if you think about Facebook, Yahoo, Google, all these guys, they bought an off the shelf PC or built one themselves, put a bunch of free software in it, wrote a little few algorithms and then plugged it into the network and it would run. So what used to cost billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars cost nearly nothing in that it just costs some sweat equity in a couple of kids in the door room. And so you had these kids competing with the incumbents. And what that I would call that is innovation cost or the cost of trying a thing went from hundreds of millions of dollars to nearly zero. So what that does is it takes the innovation, the ability to try something from large institutions that have authority and money. So let's take journalism. So in the old days, if you want to put something on video, you had to have a studio and big expensive cameras and a satellite transponder or something to transmit the things into the airway. So it was at a lot of capital. If you want to be a publisher, you had to have a printing press. If you wanted to be on the radio, you had to have a radio station. So everything costs money, which means you had to raise money, which means you had to get it from somebody. So it usually meant you had to make a proposal or if you were in a company, you had to get permission. And so what the internet has or provided was an ability for people to innovate without asking permission because they didn't need money. And what that did is it pushed, so all of the great companies in Silicon Valley these days started after the internet, the ones that started after the internet. Almost all of them started without any capital. So that's why we lost this Annalisa Xenian's book, Regional Advantage, which is about how innovation shifted from Boston to Silicon Valley. A lot of this had to do with the fact that the kids out there didn't need permission. And everybody over here was used to getting permission and granting permission as sort of a key component. And it also, I always call it, it was MBA innovation because you had to sort of have an MBA to be able to raise $100 million. But now it's designer innovation or engineer innovation where you don't need the MBA until you're going public. So what the diminishing cost of innovation did was to push innovation to the edges and then allowed a kind of grassroots innovation. So, and I'm using the word innovation kind of broadly, but we see that here at the Media Lab as well. So, you know, if you want to create hardware, it used to be that you had to have a big company to create hardware, but now we have startups like Form Labs and Little Bits. And everywhere we have, you know, half a dozen hardware status coming out of the Media Lab that was sort of unheard of a few generations ago. So the diminishing cost of innovation allows research that's being done here to go past just the demo phase into deployment. You can create a website that millions of people can see. You can create hardware that can be distributed. It is interesting to note, however, though, that commercial startups aren't the best thing for some ideas because in a way, Nicholas always, so Nicholas Negrefonte and I disagree on this. He says startups can't have any big ideas, which I don't think is true. Some startups do have big ideas, but some, I said, but I have an iteration on his critique which is some big ideas don't work in startups because you need to invest decades of time or you need to think about it in a very non-commercial way or you need to take a lot of risk that a funder wouldn't take. So in that sense, I think you do need an academic institution to shield researchers from the necessity of providing a business plan or a business model and give them time to think about it. And when you map it onto journalism, I think it's also there's this interesting parallel. So, you know, we have a night news challenge and we have a whole bunch of really amazing projects here where you're all out in the world building things because the cost of innovation is so cheap. And it turns out if you like the safecast story, even the hardware is actually, you know, citizen science doable. You don't need to raise a bunch of money, a small grant from a foundation get you kick-started. But then there are certain things like sending a whole bunch of journalists into Syria or doing data science that requires years and years and lots and lots of computing iron that don't really work with a little bit of grant money or a little bit of startup. And I think that's sort of the chasm that's happening in journalism. Where, you know, so I'm on the New York Times board and one of the things they did to sort of indoctrinate you is after your first board meeting, they send you home with a pile of all the Pulitzer Prize nominations, right? So it's not just the winner, it's just all the... It's like this. And every single one you read, it's like a year of some journalist's time saving dozens of people's lives or taking down a corrupt politician. And most of them only occur because you have the power of the legal office of the New York Times defending you. And you may have to have military support going into a space. These are not things that citizen journalists are easily going to do. But the business model of traditional journalism is challenged. We'll see whether the business model of higher ed is going to be challenged. But I think what's interesting is there are certain things that we can solve from this kind of rapid bottom-up agile innovation which I think we're getting better at. But there are certain types of things that seem to be a little bit harder. And so we need to kind of think about what the business model is. Now, it could be that startups like Kickstarter, for instance, I think is a pretty interesting start. I'm an investor, but... And I just say that as a disclosure, not as a boast. Although, I guess it turns out to be both. But there are certain models that may turn out to be big ideas coming out from small companies. And I think there's some sort of sweet spot that we're trying to find here. And so, now putting on my Knight Foundation hat, what's interesting when you think about how money flows. So, in the old days, when it used to cost $100 million, or even $10 million to fund a software idea, the guys who had the money had the power because entrepreneurs just needed money before they could actually do anything. So, sort of exaggerating here. But the venture capitalists used to kick back and say, all right, pitch me your idea. And the people who had the money kind of were a little bit arrogant and expected a full-blown impressive presentation. These days, because the cost of trying something is so cheap, there isn't enough space for everybody to get in for the first round. And a lot of these entrepreneurs go ahead and start their companies without even talking to the venture capitalists. So, the venture capitalists are having to sort of claw their way into little deals, present how they're going to be so helpful. Because in order for them to put real money in later in the company, they have to have been helpful upfront or they have to get into the deal upfront. Now, obviously, it's a seller's market for a particular category of deals. But fundamentally, if you have a track record and you have a good company, the venture capitalists are going to be trying a lot harder to get into the deal because there's just a lot less deal and a lot less money that they need. Similarly, I think in foundations, it's sort of similar, right? So, if I'm a foundation, it used to be that you would get, and we still get, but you used to get big institutions like the opera of XYZ saying we need years of operating support and you'd say, okay, well, you take a year of trying to figure out whether you want to put the money in and then you get your name on the building and it was pretty straightforward. Now, you've got hundreds of ideas. You want to get into the thing and so as Knight Foundation, I think we should be doing this in the way I think we are, is we convene meetings. We try to explain why you should take Knight Foundation money rather than venture startup money or this other person's money because you're joining a community and we have value. And if our program officers aren't adding value to the organizations that we're giving money to, I don't think we're doing our job. That's how we're trying to pick the best people is to create a community, which I think you all are. And so I think in the sense that the diminishing cost of innovation is making people who have money behave a little better. I think it's a good thing. But we still have the same problem. So we do the Knight News Challenge. We come with a lot of ideas, but I do sometimes wonder, well, who's thinking about those ideas that don't start small and how should we think about some of the bigger problems? And I think in a way, part of it is also thinking about it as a community because when you think about a system, so for instance, I boast again, I was an investor in Twitter and when we invested in Twitter, I remember a lot of people say that's the stupidest company to invest in. It's not a company. It's a feature. And what was interesting about that was it turns out that if Twitter were in the days before internet, well, it would be stupid. Actually, I have a faculty member here at the Media Lab who shouted at me when I was interviewing. I invented Twitter 30 years ago. And I said, well, it was pretty useless 30 years ago because you didn't have anything to link to. It's only useful when you're in a system. And so similarly, one idea that I have about tackling the big problems is if you think about it, all of us as an ecosystem, all of you as pieces of the ecosystem, each of you are working on certain problems within the ecosystem, but then to think about it as an ecosystem, can the ecosystem solve the big problems? And it's a complex system with no one really in charge, but somehow we should be able to think about things at that level. So this is where it gets to another piece of the Media Lab, which is I like to think about the future of design. And so in the old days, in the old days, some people still do this, when you design something, you kind of design it for one particular purpose and it's like you're building a thing. But when the world is complex and it's a system, design is gonna feel a lot more like life, like growing, like giving birth to a child in an environment that you don't have control of, so you don't know exactly where that child's gonna go and that child has your DNA, but hopefully it turns into something that you're gonna be proud of. And I think that if everybody does that and is sort of responsible, you end up with a community that's actually pretty functional, that generally heads in the trajectory that you want things to go. And I kind of feel like the solution to the journalism idea, the solution to the civics idea, the solution to the government idea is not gonna be some brilliant, aha, I got it. It's gonna be some combination of pieces in a network that sort of start to become resilient and start to grow and turn into a thing. And for that, I think the open internet that we've been talking about all these last two days is essential because as those people who try to close a system go in there, it's really like gunking up an ecosystem with pollution, trash, or constraints that you don't really want. And so I think that that's, if you think about it as a gardener, I think the open internet is the water, the openness, the air that you need. And then I think all of us are the organisms that live there that try to make this thing vibrant. Can I get the principle slide up now? So these are some principles that I've been working on and a lot of people disagree with a lot of them, but I don't care. And I guess I care about the arguments. I don't care that they disagree. But in a complex system, this is sort of the way I think you need to think about it. Instead of the sort of Newtonian, Euclidean laws of before internet when you could predict things, I think you sort of have to live very much. It's sort of a zen thing. It's more about being present and about thinking about things in this way, I think. So for instance, take the lower left one. Learning over education. I know Bracken hates this one. But to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself. And like in education, like have you completed your education? Yes, I have a degree. I'm done. Well, no, that's not, it's pretty useless. What you want is you want to learn how to learn and continue to learn. So in a lot of education is about the degree. So when the first year PhD students come to the Media Lab, I often say, pretend that at the end of your degree program, I take your degree away and say, I want you to be able to look back and say it was still worth it. I don't want you to be at the Media Lab because you want to get out. Because by the way, the Media Arts and Sciences degree that you get here isn't, there are no jobs listed for Media Arts and Science PhDs, it turns out. It's not like engineering. So I think part of it is learning should be the focus, not the education. Disobedience over compliance. I think this is also a tricky one for a lot of our faculty members. But you don't win a Nobel Prize by doing what you're told. You win a Nobel Prize by questioning authority and thinking for yourself. And I think if you're trying to create an institution that's resilient to the computerization and the robotization of the world, you don't want a whole bunch of people doing exactly the same thing as everybody else in a predictable and orderly way. Well, guess what? Talk about education. We are trying to train kids to produce exactly the same answers as you expect, not to ask questions and to be disobedient. But I think what you want is you want to create a system or an organization that's resilient to disobedience. And I think a lot of the projects here are really about being... I mean, a lot of civics is about disobedience. Emergence over authority. This just means how does the authority of a system exist? And if you look at open source projects, if you look at communities, authority tends to be emergent, right? So if you look at the heads of a lot of the successful open source projects, they tend to be somewhat quiet people who have a lot of EQ, who aren't naturally trying to grasp power but end up in power because everybody, the followers pushed them there. To me, authority is the opposite. Where somebody comes in with a title and based on the title is... And if you're in a system like an investment bank where everybody's trying to claw up to the top, all you need is sort of a club in order to manage the system because there's this natural incentive that money is pulling people to stay. But when you're in a system where people are paying to participate or volunteering to participate, like many of the nonprofits, then what you want is you want this sort of emergent authority, which is, I think, really important. Compass over maps, I think, kind of ties to the big idea versus a little idea problem, which is I think you need to have a compass heading of where you want to go. Like we use a safecast example. We want to figure out this radiation problem, but every step of the way we were trying to figure out what we were doing and we couldn't have mapped it out. And often the map costs more to build than it's worth because the complexity is so high and so unpredictable. So I think this dependence on planning, I think, is really a weakness. And it ties to this risk over safety thing. So for example, the first ISP that I set up in Japan or the ISP I set up in Japan, I tried to raise money for it, $600,000. I took it to a big company in Japan and they spent $3 million on consultants to come up with a study not to invest $600,000. So if it costs you more money to think about it than to do it, it's probably better to do it. And it turns out if you do it, you get a fact, not a theory. So they had a $3 million theory when I could have given them a $600,000 fact even if I were wrong. And so I think that ties to this practice over theory. So I think it's really important to do things, especially when the cost of doing things is cheaper than the cost of talking about it and trying to decide whether to do it or not. And a lot of times it works in practice and not in theory, which is fine because then you can figure out the theory later. Most of the world is dealing with stuff that works in theory but not in practice and they're trying to discredit reality in order to fit with their theory. But in theory, they say theory and practice are the same. And then pull over push. Again, I'll keep using the SafeCast model because I see Sean here. It's really the idea that you pull from the network as you need it rather than stocking and centrally controlling it. So in SafeCast, we started after the earthquake but we beat, I would say beat. We were more effective than any NGO or government that had planned and spent millions of dollars before the earthquake because we were able to find what we needed and what we needed and it turns out that way we found better partners and it cost less and it retained our agility. And agility is what comes out of that because if you have printing presses and lines of code and IP, those are all reasons not to shift course and stick to your map rather than the compass and all the things that we think are assets actually are liabilities when you think about it from the perspective of agility. So the power of pull is really if you're only pulling things that you need as you go, you can move very quickly and you have a lot of agility. I'm not going to go over the others because they're somewhat obvious but I think what I'll do now is to switch to a conversation and some questions. Thank you. And comments are fine too. If you... Somebody wanted to slide. Oh, there it's there. You talked about the media innovation ecosystem and one of the great values of a conference like this is we can find out what's going on. So there's some way that civic media could map real time the innovation that is taking place globally so that we're all kind of we're not reinventing the wheel. We can sort of share our experiences and pull faster. So I'm going to defer this question to Michael because that's what he should be doing. But I think that's a good point. I think that trying to figure out how to communicate... So I think you're right, the conference is a great system. I think a lot of people have experimented with ways to try to share knowledge but it seems to be one of the hardest problems because everyone's got a day job, they're very busy and people have slightly different languages and when you're face to face you can kind of coordinate your language in real time but when you sort of separate things out it gets really difficult and this is actually an interesting... There's an interesting parallel on the web of the semantic web people who are trying to create a sort of card catalog of everything and then there are other people who love tagging and kind of the sloppiness and just use search and the sort of coordination inside of an ecosystem I think it actually is also... There's an interesting parallel to just general governance and civics as well which is how do you get a bunch of people who are working on stuff coordinated? At the Media Lab we do have several different approaches. We have this sort of big data, data mining, machine learning so work like predicting things through sort of causalities and patterns versus something where people are more in charge and people are more active. So I think it's a rich domain. I don't think we figured it out but I hope that Michael will talk about a little bit during his comments. Thank you. You have an interesting couple of positions that give you a perspective on journalism, your role with the Knight Foundation as well as being on the board of the New York Times. What do you think of the way the business models are evolving in journalism? What do you think about the way the business ecosystem is evolving and sort of where do you think business models are going in journalism? So I think that's sort of the million dollar... or not million dollar question. I don't think I want to say that I have a view in terms of what's going to actually work. I think that there are so many variables that are moving and it's pretty unpredictable and so what I would do and that's why I'm on the Knight Foundation board and at the Media Lab and at the New York Times. I think we have to try everything. I think there's a possibility that the traditional media companies kind of figure something out and then there's a paid model of the advertising mobile, there's a whole bunch of models that we're trying at the New York Times some more successfully than others. I think that the Knight News Challenge is trying... the point of that and some of our prototype funding is to really try to see if we can find a business model somewhere. The good news... I don't know if it's good news. The news is that the news folks like New York Times and Financial Times, all of us realize that we're in a moment of crisis and that if somebody figures it out it's going to help everybody. So the good news is we... I saw Matt Carroll here. There he is. So he's heading the news initiative at the Media Lab and it's interesting the extent to which the news companies are willing to get together to talk about the future of the business model as well as the future of editorial. So there's a lot of cooperation more than you would normally expect but I think the jury's still out on what it is and I think we have to try everything until we figure it out. So it's sort of a non-answer but let me know if you figure it out. Hi Joey, thank you for this slide. I watched you put it up and about two dozen cameras went up to take pictures so there must be some magic here. I want to ask though personally which of these you struggle with the most and why? Struggle with it in terms of... It's difficult for me? Correct. I guess the one that I struggle with the most is in a funny way... Let's see, they're all tricky different ways. I think resilience over strength is sort of an interesting one which is what I mean by that one is instead of trying to sort of bulk up and resist failure invest the same money on recovery and resilience. And when you're running an institution when you're trying to build stuff you tend to want to invest in trying to... and it's related to the risk over safety trying to minimize failure rather than trying to work on resilience. And this is also... it's kind of a zen thing too, right? So if you're extremely present and ready for anything you're in an extremely resilient state and so if you get shoved you wobble but you come back and if you're not present you're always focused on the future and the past you end up trying to build walls and trying to make sure that you don't get shoved and it's hard because when you're surrounded by other planners in an institution like this you tend to sort of focus on structure which is really kind of the strength versus resilience structure versus this sort of bounciness and again I think that on the internet a lot of the pieces are very resilient but when you're in an institution that's used to be a lot of planning it's hard to create that interface.