Untitled - socium.ge

426 Pekka Himanena work culture in which new ideas and creative achievements are encouragedand rewarded (see Alahuhta and Himanen, forthcoming, on how this is changingmanagement culture).This is related to another feature that differs from the industrial economy.In the informational economy, there is very little work that can be donealone. In particular, most innovative work is based on working together withother innovators, in networks of innovation. This is why it must be callednetworked creative passion. This is the case both on the level of the companyand the individual. Within companies, people work as teams, which is a formof operation that requires an open flow of information. This flow issupported by IT systems that make the information available to all participants,as well as by the culture of open communication within the company.But a new openness of information is also very important on anotherlevel. The openness that is meant here does not exclude proprietary information,of which there is plenty in the informational economy. But the enormousefforts needed for innovation are not possible even for the biggestcompanies on their own because, in global competition, the requiredresources are so huge. This is why big companies network even with theircompetitors to develop the most basic-level innovations, such as the Netstandards or the standards for mobile phones. The history of technology hasshown that a closed approach has difficulties in competition with opennetworks: for example, Apple’s closed architecture, which was originallytechnically superior, lost out to IBM’s open PC architecture; Sony’s closedBetamax video standard lost out to the open VHS standard; and in thehistory of the Net and mobile telecommunication, the open Internet/Web andGMS architectures got the better of their closed alternatives. So, in theglobal informational economy, maintaining one’s leading position in themost fundamental areas of innovation requires networking. It is critical forcompanies to get others to join in their revolution; otherwise, even greatinnovations become outdated secrets buried within the company. Of course,this network of innovation is only possible with a sufficiently open flow ofinformation.It is the network structure of our global economy that advancesnetworked creative passion as the culture of the informational economy.This is also related to one of the reasons why the closed, communist societieslost in competition with the open, capitalist societies: when innovationbecame central to economic growth an open flow of innovations becamecrucial. Scientists in the Soviet Union were as well educated as those in theUnited States, but new innovations remained closed in secret military laboratories,whereas in the West military innovations were allowed to flow intocivil innovations (some examples being the computer and computernetworking).