Monday, September 08, 2003

User Innovation. Given my belief that it is the role of the developer-user that is essential to "open development" (which I will discuss later), I was pleased to come across the following MIT web site: userinnovation: Empirical research is finding that users rather than manufacturers are the actual developers of many or most new products and services - and that they are a major locus of innovative activity in the economy. This finding opens up new questions and avenues for exploration in fields ranging from economics to management of technology to organizational behaviour to marketing research. Examples are patterns in innovation by users, characteristics of innovating users, design of a user-centered innovation process, economics of a distributed innovation process that includes users as innovators, and social welfare implications of innovations by users. [Emphasis added] I find this view to fit my own experience extremely well. It is often users of a business application that see its limitations and are inspired to build a new application that better fits the business they came from. I just started the paper "Profiting from Voluntary Information Spillovers: How Users Benefit by Freely Revealing Their Innovations". 3:40:30 PM

Donald Davidson Obituary. Dr. Davidson wrote his dissertation on Plato's "Philebus," a dialogue between Socrates and Philebus, one of his many foils, a lengthy defense of the superiority of intellectual activity over physical pleasure. Dr. Davidson told Mr. Lepore that he thought Quine was perplexed over why he chose such an antiquated topic, but kept it to himself. This is really going to bug me now...So I just went off and looked into it while writing this entry. In tracking this down, I stumbled across the following set of links on Davidson (see #18). Apparently the movie, The Thirteenth Floor, references Davidson! Of course the link is now dead, but Google to the rescue, with a cached page describing why Philebus is relevant. It seems to be an excerpt from this bio. I guess I'll have to go and read Philebus now...In his honor. (I wonder if Project Gutenberg has it...) 4:31:58 AM