Last night @joi Ito gave a talk about Open Innovation at the Italian Parliament in Rome. I am in Rome right now but I didn’t make it to the Parliament yesterday and followed the talk through the online streaming.
As Joi Ito says on his blog, “It was an interesting time to be talking to the Italian Parliament, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi having recently been attacked with a statuette of the Milan cathedral by Massimo Tartaglia causing the government to go after Facebook where Tartagalia’s fan pages was ordered to be shut down. Four Google executives are on trial in Italy for criminal charges for allowing an offensive video to be posted to Google Video.”
Needless to say, not many MPs were there, and the ones who attended were mainly concerned with defending their political views rather than discussing open innovation, the topic of the night. One of them, Antonio Palmieri, from Berlusconi’s party, went as far as saying that “to write good laws one doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert on the specific field/topic the law is going to apply to” [the web in this case]. Makes sense, right?
Nonetheless Joi Ito delivered a solid and insightful talk about what open innovation is, why it matters, what are the pillars of open innovation and what are the challenges ahead. And I think this last bit was the most important take away of the night. We massively reduced the barriers [friction] to connectivity and information exchange thanks to the Internet Protocol and the World Wide Web. We also managed to reduce the level of friction from a legal point of view thanks to frameworks like Creative Commons which allow us to share stuff legally. Now the next big challenge the web and open innovation are up against is not connectivity, nor the law: it’s politics.
Here’s the Prezi. Enjoy.
You can follow @joi on twitter, and read his blog here http://joi.ito.com/
