Irving Wladawsky-Berger,IBM’s Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation, has posted an entry on his blog about The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation, which echoes many of the themes we’ve been exploring at The Cooperation Project:

I have personally thought a lot about this question, and I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something deeper going on beyond the rational answers discussed above. I wonder if there isn’t something about the human condition that urges us to collaborate, work as a community and solve problems together (as just one example, see the World Community Grid Project). Making money is important to us all. But so is gaining the respect of our families, friends, colleagues, and the community at large — maybe even more so for most people. Why is that? Allow me to speculate. We are, after all, social animals, and perhaps some of the answers are found in evolutionary biology and our continuing attempt to become alpha members of the group. For many, what brings us together in communities is perhaps something more spiritual. While I do not think of myself as religious, I found a quote from Rabbi Tzvi Marx in Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat” (p 438) particularly moving in this regard: “Collaborating so mankind can achieve its full potential is God’s hope.” Human beings respond to many things.

I think that all these motivations have always been part of economic activity and of capitalism. Open source doesn’t change that. What is different today is that for the first time, in large part because of the Internet, we have the capacity to self-organize into groups fluidly and globally. The firm is no longer the only — or, in some circumstances, the optimal — institution for organizing productive, value-creating work. And that promises a much more diverse and exciting — and very innovative — kind of marketplace.