Innovations: business and academia

Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Tue, 17 Sep 1996 11:29:01 -0400

Commercial companies are very good at providing motivation
for development, finding resources and rewarding contributions
of ideas and effort - this seems to be a winning combination
when an idea is relatively simple and can be developed into
a product by a relatively small group of people in a reasonable
time frame. When one wants to design a global system that would
benefit many diverse groups of people in the long run, then open
social discussion would appear essential.
Now, what if one tries to develop a business providing services
with a wide range of implications? Like a new system of knowledge
distribution on the Net? Is it possible to find an approach that
would promote business interests (profit, market share, security, PR,
not scaring away investors and not giving advantage to competition,
etc.) of the company, and at the same time involve people in
academia and general public in discussing optimal structure of the
venture and its product line, writing additional software, choice of
which parts of the sytem should remain proprietary and which should
be made open?

I think this is a generally interesting issue - and it seems to be
growing in importance as more and more businesses and products become
parts of the global system. Now I also find myself quite practically
interested in it, as I am working on development of Automated
Collaborative Filtering (ACF) systems for Internet.

I would appreciate any general or practical ideas you may have on
the subject, or references to any relevant sources.
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Alexander Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com> www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html
Firefly Network, Inc.: <alexc@firefly.net> www.ffly.com
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