Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Process Networks in Basic Research

JSB and I have made the case that loosely coupled process networks are transforming global industries.  I have just come across a significant new venture that promises to transform basic research as well.

I met recently with Scott Johnson, the founder and head of the Myelin Repair Foundation, based here in Silicon Valley.  The MRF is orchestrating distributed innovation and provides a model for a new form of innovation network.

Innovating on the innovation process

Call it meta-innovation - MRF is innovating on the innovation process itself. Specifically, it is developing a highly modular and loosely coupled approach consistent with the one that JSB and I described in our new book, The Only Sustainable Edge.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the MRF at the time we wrote our book. Otherwise, we would certainly have included it as a great example of the design principles we wrote about.

The MRF is starting to get attention in the business press – it got a page one story in the Wall Street Journal and coverage in Business Week but, from my perspective, the coverage misses the real innovation of MRF.

Inefficiencies in current medical research

Medical research in the academic world today is highly fragmented and relatively inefficient:

• Researchers generally take on projects because they find them intellectually interesting rather than because of any considered view about the impact the results may have on broader disease research objectives
• Researchers rarely collaborate with each other across academic institutions - more often than not, they tend to view each other as competitors
• Disciplinary boundaries further fragment research efforts - findings within one academic discipline may never make their way into other disciplines
• Major funders of academic research projects in the medical field rarely have defined strategies for generating treatments for specific diseases
• Researchers seeking funding are often risk averse - they tend to scope out research projects that have a high probability of success to increase the likelihood of future funding
• The lead-time between the conclusion of experiments and general dissemination of results and learning can be as long as two years
• Since many researchers are unconcerned about the potential commercial use of their discoveries, they may not seek patent protection.  Biopharmaceutical companies are less interested in commercially developing discoveries if they lack patent proection.

Targeting multiple sclerosis

As its name suggests, MRF has a very specific target - it seeks to mobilize and focus research on a particular biological process – myelin repair.  Myelin is the substance that coats our nerves and helps to accelerate the passage of electrical signals through our nerves.  In multiple sclerosis, the myelin coating on our nerves begins to degrade, resulting in a host of symptoms, including fatigue, blindness, loss of balance, slurred speech and problems with cognition, ultimately leading to paralysis and death.

Healthy bodies are able to repair myelin damage, but we understand little about the processes behind either the breakdown or repair of myelin.  By deepening our understanding of these processes, we could identify promising treatments that would help patients with multiple sclerosis to slow down, and eventually stop or even reverse the progression of their disease.  It would not be a cure, but it would help MS patients to live longer, better quality lives while waiting for a cure, which may not be available for another 30 – 50 years.  MRF believes that its innovative approach to research can compress the time required to identify promising drug targets for treatment from 15 - 20 years to a mere five years.

Orchestrating distributed innovation

What is new and exciting about the MRF approach? It creates a distributed network of independent researchers who collaborate in defining a longer term research roadmap and sharing results with each other on a frequent basis. The jointly developed research roadmap helps participants to construct a shared model of possible explanations of the myelin repair process and to pursue parallel, rather than sequential, problem-solving.

MRF strikes a balance between the value of distributed specialized capability and initiative and the value that can result from coordinated effort organized around a broader research agenda targeted to the development of a specific treatment for multiple sclerosis.

MRF has recruited five of the top researchers in the relevant biological disciplines from universities across North America.  Each researcher runs a lab of from 15 to 40 research staff, so the total headcount mobilized in this distributed network is substantial and will continue to grow.  These researchers maintain their existing institutional affiliations, but they join together in the collaboration infrastructure created by MRF. This collaboration infrastructure includes orchestrating joint research reviews twice yearly and monthly collaboration conference calls, linking all participants virtually through a shared audio/video/data platform facilitating daily interactions and archiving critical intellectual property for patent protection.  MRF supplements the capabilities of this core team by contracting with other academic researchers and commercial entities to expedite completion of the research plan in the most efficient and effective manner. 

MRF has signed intellectual property agreements with each of the academic institutions involved. Royalties generated from discoveries funded by MRF are shared 50/50 with the academic institution.  MRF supports researchers in ensuring that relevant IP is protected and helps to identify appropriate commercialization partners in the biopharmaceutical industry for license agreements on MRF patents to speed the transition from lab to clinic.  With its 50% share of anticipated royalties, MRF will be able to fund even more research in the years ahead and ultimately become self-funding.

In some respects, the MRF approach looks like open source with IP protection.

Accelerating capability building

But the real incentive for collaboration is not the funding received from MRF or the potential royalties down the road; it is the opportunity for researchers to make faster progress in their own areas of interest and to deepen their own understanding by collaborating with other leading edge researchers.  The researchers are coming together in this process network because they see an opportunity to make rapid progress in solving large, complex, “real world” medical problems by working with more closely with each other, yet maintaining their institutional independence.

As Ben Barres, Professor of Neurology at Stanford University and one of the five senior researchers collaborating in the MRF network, notes: “we are bringing together academic scientists that operate in an environment where traditionally data can not be shared until after experiments are complete and published.  Within the consortium model, every time the team gets together, sparks fly.  There’s no question that better teamwork in science can significantly accelerate results.”

Of the top five academic researchers Scott Johnson targeted for participation in this process network, not a single one turned him down.

Scott Cook, the Founder and Chairman of Intuit Corporation and an early contributor to the Myelin Repair Foundation, observes that “the Myelin Repair Foundation is pioneering a new way to organize medical research that speeds breakthrough drug discovery.  It uses a unique approach to shared incentives to produce intense collaboration and rapid idea-sharing among the leading neuroscience centers.”

Early results

MRF is still at a relatively early stage in its work.  It has raised $5 million, with a goal of raising another $20 million over the next two years. It has recruited its team of leading edge researchers, defined the research roadmap, deployed the support infrastructure and is now beginning the second year of its five-year research program.  Early indications of success include filing of the first provisional patent application, identification of three new areas for drug targets and higher levels of collaborative interdependency in the second year research plan.

Much broader implications for basic research

What’s really exciting about the MRF research model is that it can be applied much more broadly.  It represents a highly innovative approach to orchestrating distributed specialized capability in support of broader research agendas.  The modular, loosely coupled approach to process design that JSB and I discussed in our book doesn't just apply to supply chain management or product development; it actually can yield positive results in basic research as well. The potential is enormous.

The Aphrodisiac of Attention

I was supposed to speak this week at Supernova 2005 with my colleague, JSB, but a travel snafu left me stranded in London.  By all accounts, JSB did a great job presenting even without my support - some blog coverage is available here and here.

One of my big regrets about missing Supernova 2005 was that I could not be there to hear Linda Stone in person - for my money, she is one of the most thoughtful people on the social implications of technology.  She apparently gave a fascinating talk.  Nathan Torkington over at O'Reilly Radar wrote up some great notes on her talk.

Linda coined the term "continuous partial attention" which she describes (in Nathan's notes) as follows:

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.  Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities.

In her talk, Linda described twenty year cycles in the tension between the collective and the individual:

• 1945-1965 - the organization/institution as the center of gravity
• 1965-1985 - me and self-expression
• 1985-2005 - the network as the center of gravity

So, where do we go from here?  Again, from Nathan's notes, Linda suggests

So now we're overwhelmed, underfulfilled, seeking meaningful connections. . . . Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc. The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. . . . experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive.

Linda is on to something significant here. I  posted before about the emergence of attention as the scarce economic resource, but Linda is highlighting the growing social value of attention.

Linda's comments remind me of a conversation I had ten years ago with a senior exec of a major telecommunications company. He proudly announced to me that his company had a twenty year plan: "In the first ten years, we will commercialize technology to help everyone connect anytime, anywhere.  But the real money will be made in the next ten years.  At that point, we will focus on providing technology to block access anytime, anywhere. Can you imagine how much people will pay for that capability?" Well, we're just now entering into that second ten years . . .  In the age of crackberry addiction, we are starting to search for ways to regain control of our attention.

While we may not block all access, we will certainly filter access. As Nat's notes suggest, Linda sees the opportunity:

Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Technology will certainly be important, but I remain convinced that technology alone will not maximize the return on our attention.  We will need human intermediaries to harness the technology and adapt it to our changing needs.  Some of you may remember the concept of the infomediary that Marc Singer and I wrote about in Net Worth. That concept is resurfacing in interesting ways these days.

Offshore Labor Markets

The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has just released a major new study on The Emerging Global Labor Market, focusing on the dynamics of supply and demand for offshore talent in services.  Typical of MGI, the study dives deep into specific industry sectors (in this case, eight sectors - IT services, retail banking, packaged software, retail, insurance, pharma, health care and auto) and, building upon this analysis, extrapolates to a broader perspective. It is a must read for anyone interested in the evolution of offshoring activity.

This study is already starting to receive media attention. The Financial Times gave it a front page story headlined "Foreign threat to service jobs 'overblown'".

It's this kind of story that gives me concern.  The MGI study covers a lot of ground - it offers a detailed assessment of the relative levels of offshore employment in 28 low wage-rate countries and 8 mid- and high-wage countries in 2003, the size and composition of offshore labor pools, estimates of the "theoretical maximum" of service jobs that could be moved offshore, and projections regarding the likely level of offshore employment by 2008.

So what does the media focus on?  The bottom line number - how many jobs are likely to move offshore to low wage rate countries by 2008?  And yet this is where the MGI report is the weakest.

The MGI projections are reassuring (if you hold a service job in a high wage rate country). By 2008, MGI projects that there will be 4.1 million service jobs offshore - that may sound like a lot, until you put it into context - it represents only 1.2 percent of service jobs in high wage rate countries.

How does MGI arrive at these numbers?  Well, the approach is certainly less rigorous than their estimates of current offshore employment or available labor pools. By necessity it would have to be, since we are dealing with choices that thousands of firms are going to have to make over the next five years in a rapidly changing global economic environment subject to a host of political uncertainties along the way. MGI built its reputation on rigorous analyses of current and historical economic activity - it has only recently ventured into the far riskier business of projecting future economic activity.

MGI certainly does a heroic job in generating these estimates, but its challenge is highlighted by its observation that the pace of adoption is limited more by company-specific barriers than by regulatory barriers.  Company specific barrier are much more difficult to aggregate and quantify than assessing the impact of laws that may prevent certain forms of offshoring. I could not find a detailed discussion of the methodology used by MGI to generate its projections of job movement, but some of the sources appear a bit problematic.  For example, the MGI report cites interviews with 83 HR managers of multinational corporations, HR agencies primarily supplying MNCs and heads of remote centers suggesting that even if offshore job candidates had appropriate academic qualifications, 87% of the candidates would be rejected for reasons like poor language skills or cultural differences.  OK, but are HR managers of MNCs and their HR agencies even the right people to be talking to?  What if the jobs are outsourced as well as offshored?  What about talking to the hiring managers of third party outsourcing service providers? What about looking at the extraordinary growth of private training centers in cities like Bangalore that are working to upgrade the talent of young people to make them more attractive for offshore service jobs?

I have a concern that the MGI research does not fully capture the dynamic changes that are going on in major offshore locations in terms of talent development or the growth of competitive pressures that will make MNCs more willing to undertake significant offshoring and outsourcing initiatives. Corporate perceptions and practices can change rapidly as more experience with offshoring accumulates and as pressure for performance mounts. The MGI report may therefore have significantly under-estimated the magnitude of the job movement ahead.

Of course, none of these concerns should detract from the importance of this study.  To my knowledge, this is the most substantial effort to quantify the impact of offshore job movement.  It will likely remain for a long time as the benchmark against which all other studies and estimates will be measured.

The Power of Productivity

EconLog pointed me to an extended interview with my old friend, William Lewis, the director emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute.  Bill is an extraordinarily thoughtful and insightful guy who, in addition to working for 20 years at McKinsey, spent time at the World Bank, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.

The interview prompted me to give a plug for Bill's book, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability.  It is a very rich examination of differences in productivity around the world and, more importantly, the key drivers shaping differences in productivity.  Drawing heavily on the in-depth research of the McKinsey Global Institute, Bill doesn't just offer provocative perspectives, he backs it up with a wealth of data.

He summarizes his basic approach early in the book:

Over the course of our research a single theme emerged: the importance of productivity . . . . Productivity, however, varies enormously around the world . . . Thus, most of our work sought to explain the reasons for the differences in productivity around the world.  . . . Many people look for the causes of poor economic performance primarily in macroeconomics, but we found that must also look at the industry level for causal factors for economic performance.

Perhaps one of Bill's most provocative views is that education matters far less than many people would imagine:

Many people believe that the educational attainment of a nation's current labor force is responsible for the success or failure of its economy.  The importance of the education of the workforce has been taken way too far.  In other words, education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity.  The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional education level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.

In the context of a recent post I did on choice, Bill quotes some well-known economists in a section entitled "Elites Want to Control Others and Reward Themselves" (Bill pulls no punches):

Peter Bauer, no friend of elites, quotes Sir Arthur Lewis as saying that "the advantage of economic growth is not that wealth increases happiness, but that it increases the range of human choice." Through economic growth, ordinary people get to choose what they want.  Bauer goes on to say, "It is well-to-do and established politicians, academics, media men, clerics, writers and artists who are apt to dismiss economic choice as unimportant."

If you want to understand why productivity varies so much around the world and have a stimulating read at the same time, pick up Bill's book - you will not be disappointed.

Star Wars and Offshoring

OK, I can't resist.  My old friend from business school, Mike Massey, pointed me to a column on "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out" written for the New York Times by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite science fiction writers.  Neal makes an interesting case that Star Wars reflects some broader social trends that ought to give us pause. His key comments:

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

And then later on,

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

Neal is on to something big here, although he makes a mistake by confining geeks to scientists and technologists.  In fact, geeks can be found in a broad array of endeavors, ranging from crafts and extreme sports to the remix music culture and the hot rod car culture.  If we broaden the notion of geeks to anyone who pursues their passion in creating things or perfecting their skills, we might find a new lens to view the growing culture gap in the U.S. (and elsewhere).  Maybe the real division is not between "Red State" and "Blue State" , but between geeks and veggers.

For those of you who are not familiar with Neal Stephenson, he is the author of, among many other books, the cult classic in Silicon Valley - Snow Crash. Besides being a really funny book, Neal's description of the Metaverse, a three dimensional virtual world where people spend a good deal of their time, captured the imagination of a whole generation of geeks and inspired them to push the frontiers of computer technology.  There's a whole lot of Neal behind the flourishing massive multiplayer online role-playing game culture.

By the way, even though I didn't like Star Wars III, I will forever be indebted to George Lucas for the early Star Wars movies and, most importantly, for one of the best movies of all time - American Graffiti - another parable about geeks and exploration (and hot rods).

Unbundling Financial Supermarkets

I just came across Tom Peters' exercise in pattern recognition, commenting on three news announcements in a 48 hour period.  I couldn't agree more.

His blog reminded me that I have long had a particular problem with the metaphor of "financial supermarkets."  Now, let's see - when was the last time you ran into a supermarket that grew its own fresh produce, processed its own packaged goods and manufactured all the other stuff it offered for sale?  Yet that is exactly the business model that many major financial institutions embarked on in the 1980's and 1990's.  These so-called supermarkets have a choice - are they in the customer relationship business or are they in the product innovation and commercialization business? Straddle strategies are becoming less and less tenable.  Choices need to be made - unbundle and then rebundle through collaborative relationships, not acquisitions in the quest for elusive synergies. I have written about this before, both in this blog and in Harvard Business Review (purchase required).  The chickens are coming home to roost as financial markets become less and less patient with scale for the sake of scale.

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS

We're gearing up for Kevin Werbach's Supernova 2005 here in San Francisco next week.  JSB and I will be speaking there and there's a host of interesting people featured on the agenda.  One person in particular that I am looking forward to seeing again is Philip Evans from Boston Consulting Group.  Philip and I go way back - we both entered BCG at the same time even though, to his dismay, I departed after two years to make the trek to Silicon Valley to do a business start-up.  Philip stayed at BCG, wrote a great book, Blown to Bits, and we have managed to stay in touch off and on over the years.

In preparation for Supernova, Philip did an interview on "Wikis, Weblogs and RSS" along with another friend, Ross Mayfield, and Janice Fraser, the CEO of Adaptive Path. It is an interesting read on what the new Internet means for business. For my money, Philip puts a bit too much emphasis on transaction costs and not nearly enough discussion of the role of the new Internet in driving innovation and capability building, but then I just wrote a book on this.

For those who haven't seen it yet, JSB and I did a similar interview with Kevin Werbach on "Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?" (accessing the interview requires a brief and free registration).

Cooperation and Competition

Thanks to Advancing Insights for pointing me to some interesting new reports from The Institute for the Future.

The first report, Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business (link for pdf file download),  by Howard Rheingold, Andrea Saveri, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and Kathi Vian, observes that "cooperation is one partner in a pair of strategic choices; its constant companion is competition.  The two go hand-in-hand, posing a choice at every juncture . . ."  It focuses on two key business questions:

• How can new insights about the dynamics of cooperation help us to identify new and lucrative models for organizing production and wealth creation that leverage win-win dynamics?
• How can organizations enhance their creativity and grow potential innovation with cooperation-based strategic models?

This report is a helpful review of the emerging inter-disciplinary field having to do with cooperation and cooperative strategy (the bibliography alone makes the report worthwhile).  The authors develop a map of the relevant disciplines comprised of seven lenses and seven levers, creating a very rich terrain to survey. In fact, at times it becomes too rich - I began to hunger for the classic two by two matrix that is the foundation of consulting.

More broadly, the report ultimately disappoints in terms of delivering on the two questions framed at the outset.  The raw materials are there, but the synthesis into actionable recommendations for business executives remains to be done. The final section outlining five key areas of potential innovation and disruption is suggestive, but the implications need to be developed more explicitly.

The second report, Technologies of Cooperation (link for pdf file download), by the same authors minus Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, is more satisfying, perhaps because it stays closer to the technologies that are reshaping the business landscape.  The authors focus on eight key clusters of cooperation-amplifying technologies:

• Self-organizing mesh networks
• Community computing grids
• Peer production networks
• Social mobile computing
• Group-forming networks
• Social software
• Social accounting tools
• Knowledge collectives

This report has an even richer map for the reader to navigate, combining the eight clusters of technologies with the seven key dimensions of cooperative systems discussed in the earlier report. The authors observe that

. . . each example of a cooperative technology is also a model for thinking about future social forms as well as future tools; each example embodies principles that can help us think more strategically about cooperation.

The report concludes by outlining seven guidelines for learning from cooperative technologies.  Each guideline has value, but the first one, for my money, is by far the most important: "shift focus from designing systems to providing platforms".  Understanding the profound implications of this one principle is challenging in itself. But it is also a huge mindset shift for most executives, even those in relatively enlightened technology companies as most recently (and repeatedly) illustrated by Steve Jobs at Apple.

At the end of this report, the authors come back to where they started in the first report:

One clear lesson from this research is that cooperative strategy does not replace competitive strategy: the two are inter-related and co-evolve. A key challenge is learning to understand the dance between the two strategies, their respective range of choices, and the conditions that urge an organization to follow one or the other at a particular time period and environmental context.

This is the crux of the matter.  These two reports do a great job of surveying the landscape and even creating some interesting maps to orient us. What we need now is a more prescriptive view of the paths that are most promising through this landscape - constrained by the awareness that the landscape continues to evolve and that individual context does matter.

I should mention that the bibliography in the first report rightfully highlights the work of Elinor Ostrom, especially her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.  For anyone interested in understanding the governance mechanisms that help to foster cooperation, her book is an essential read. 

Craft Manifesto

Thanks to David Weinberger for pointing me to Hobbyprincess, the intriguing blog by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a PhD student at the University of Helsinki, who is focused on the interface between technology, fashion and crafting.

In one posting, Mutanen comments on the rapid growth of the hobby and craft business in the United States.  It expanded from $20 billion in 2000 to $29 billion in 2004 - a growth of almost 50% in just 4 years. Clearly, more and more people are pursuing their passion to create things.

Mutanen has posted a Draft Craft Manifesto that does a great job of capturing the key dynamics shaping the growth of crafting. For example:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make.  This is not possible in purchased products.

6. Work inspires work.  Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.

10. Learning techniques brings people together.  This creates on-line and offline communities of practice.

I wish I had been able to see Mutanen's presentation at Reboot7, the meetup for "practical visionaries" that just concluded in Copenhagen.  Entitled "Craftblogging – A Window into the Long Tail of Fashion?", this is the abstract for her presentation:

In Europe and Japan, the trend against mass-produced fashion is growing. An increasing number of people prefer to buy their apparel from a designer someone has recommended, or one that they personally know. This presentation is about craftblogging - producing hand-made fashion items and publishing them on weblogs. Examples of how people produce, tag and share self-made fashion items on-line provide an opportunity to understand the potential of the Long Tail of Fashion.

Mutanen is on to something very significant.  The urge to create is getting stronger and more distributed.  Technology is playing a significant role in connecting people who share this passion for creation and, in the process, it is intensifying the urge to create.

The Burden of Choice

Virginia Postrel has just written a useful article on "Consumer Vertigo". Her target is the growing body of literature making the case that the explosion in choice we experience as consumers in market societies is creating growing unhappiness and anxiety rather than satisfaction and fulfillment. She cites just two of the most critical books on this topic - Robert Lane's The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies and Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice. (One wag in a review of Schwartz's book on Amazon commented that he came across 20 books on the same topic and couldn't make up his mind, so he didn't buy any of them.)

In her critique of these books, Postrel observes:

For good scientific reasons, psychology experiments systematically screen out the habits and business practices that make real-life choices, especially shopping decisions, manageable. . . Businesses have strong incentives not just to offer options but to help customers navigate these choices.

She makes the case that abundant choice serves us well:

. . . something is missing from the simplistic argument that people would be happier if we went back to the good old days of one-cut-fits-all jeans. That something is pluralism. People are different - in size and shape, in personality, in tastes, in values. . . . Abundant choice accommodates this variation.

But she observes that greater choice has consequences:

In a world of choices, virtue comes from learning to make commitments without regrets. And commitment, in turn, requires self-confidence and self-knowledge.

Although she doesn't develop this further, Postrel has hit on something really significant here that helps to explain the paradox of choice that is playing out around us: expanding choice begets even more choice.  The more choice we have, the more we have to decide what it is that we really want.  The more we reflect on what we really want, the more we end up getting involved in the creation of the goods that we buy and use. This in part explains why, in a growing range of domains, we are seeing customers get more actively involved in co-creation of products and services. The more we participate in the creation of products and services, the more choices we end up creating for ourselves.