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On World Intellectual Property Day, who can predict what will happen with the value of intellectual property in the future. Will it still be the same in 2025, will it be seen as an irrelevance or will everything be crowd-sourced, socially-owned and open sourced? As a publisher Gower has a vested interest in what will happen and, with the caveat that my views are coloured by my position, let me offer three observations …
Paid for content versus everything for free
Free stuff is always welcome but without question, you do get what you pay for, and innovation, creativity and new content all have a cost. Personally, I think that, while new models will continue to emerge (who could have imagined the mobile apps model 10 years ago!), the need for curation of content and information will mean that customers will still be willing to pay. In a world where digital content is exploding, the value of rigorous, consistent and well signposted content is surely very significant;
New shared models
Crowdsourcing is attracting a lot of attention, but there are other more mainstream opportunities for businesses to create and innovate that don’t involve the mass market. Collaborative business is on the rise and with it comes a need and an aspiration for organizations to share risk and, consequently, share reward. That must point towards some new models that enable practical shared ownership of IP rights between different organizations, companies, governments and NGOs.
A collaborative approach to publishing
I am very proud of the fact that Gower has always worked with our authors and editors on the basis of licensed rights. We have never insisted that authors assign their copyright as part of a publishing agreement nor have we sought to bind them to us with restrictive arrangements for their future books. We are already developing new collaborative models for publishing in the future – models that enable us to contribute and profit from those aspects of a work’s intellectual property where we can add value through editing, distribution and marketing, whilst at the same time, enabling authors to exploit their own IP in directions and media that are outside our (realistic) reach.
A handful of Gower and Ashgate titles on intellectual property:
I try to avoid falling to the trap of drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from research. That said, the first thing that leapt out at me when I read Sociagility’s ‘Social Media and the City: The FTSE 100 Social Performance Index 2012′ was that of the 2/3rds of large companies whose social performance index was below that of their peers, many of them either seemed uninterested in social media, had a weak social media strategy or were simply unconcerned with direct external public communications. The 38 page research report is available to download from the Sociagility website. Niall Cook, one of the reports’ co-authors is also author of Gower Publishing’s Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work and the, forthcoming, The Social CEO: Why Business Leaders Should Make Time for Social Media.
As one of the baby boomer generation, I freely admit that sometimes I have struggled to keep up with the mindset of Generation Xers, let alone the newest generations that have followed, so I found Alexander Manu’s thought piece on how brands can engage the Millennnial Generation a great source of enlightenment – not least because I am beginning to understand and embrace some of the concepts such as gamification to which he alludes. If you are involved in any aspect of brand management, marketing or design, do take a moment to read it. Alexander Manu’s new book Behavior Space: Play, Pleasure and Discovery as a Model for Business Value is published in December.
Philip Weiss’ presentation at a recent event in Brussels picks up a theme that has been around for a number of years but, one that I still think organizations have difficulty accommodating; even thought it is pretty much basic common sense. Innovation involves trial and error and innovation in the context of accelerating speeds of change involves plenty of opportunities for geting it wrong. Every organization needs to work out the dimensions of their own particular tightrope: play it too safe and you’re soon out of the game; overcomplicate the whole process or fail to learn from your failures and it’s also ‘game over’. Philip is author of the forthcoming book Hyperthinking: Creating a New Mindset for the Age of Networks.
Penny Pullan’s Virtual Working Summit is back! After the success of last year, Penny has lined up some great sessions for this year’s free event including: How to be a Successful Communicator when Working Virtually Across Borders (Richard Pooley); Getting the Best Out of Cross-Cultural Virtual Teams (Sanda Ionescu); and Adapting Risk Management for Virtual Working (PennyPullan). The week of the Summit starts on Monday 25th June. You can log in and listen to the speakers from wherever you are in the world, as well as interacting with them online. And the whole Summit is absolutely free to join.
Penny Pullan is co-author of A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management.
Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion is one of the most engaging and authoritative futurists when it comes to digital money. You can see him doing his stuff at the the recent Lift 2012 event in which he draws out several different scenarios, among them one where the G20 is replaced by the C50, bringing together the 50 richest cities in the world. David further explores the implications of a world, in which nations have become more like football teams: you cherish and support them, but would not necessarily go to war for them.
At the end of the talk David discusses the fall of geographically determined currencies. As he predicted in his talk in Lift 2008 in Korea, the cost of creating a new currency will collapse, therefore expect many different, new currencies to come in the future!
Dave Birch is editor of Gower Publishing’s Digital Identity Management.
Sociagility, the social media agency run by Niall Cook and Tony Burgess-Webb, have used their social media tracking software to track the performance of all the Olympic sponsors in terms of their social media performance, their status and their potential. I’ll leave it to you to visit the rankings and see who is currently on top. This is an interesting exercise in brand perception but also a very good case example of the rise and rise of social media as a communcation channel. Niall Cook is author of Gower Publishing’s Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software will Change the Future of Work.
The 25th – 29th June 2012 hosts the Ed-Media Conference in Denver, Colorado. This conference sees author Nicola Johnson giving two presentations:
- Internet addiction – the hype and the evidence
- Publishing from your PhD (doctoral stream)
The focus of her two presentations come from the research and information she put together in writing her books The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction (published by Ashgate, 2009) and Publishing from Your PhD (published by Gower, 2010).
