Shared Tools in the Share Economy

Hamburg.
The final keynote on this first day of next09 is by Matthias Schrader of next09 conference organisers Sinnerschrader, who brings us back to the conference theme 'share economy'. What can we share, what do we want to share, what do we get out of sharing?

In the share economy, what we share are in the first place the tools we use; using (physical, mechanical) tools, of course, has long been seen as a uniquely human trait (although that belief has now been shown to be mistaken - other animals use tools, too). Perhaps the next step from here is the belief that only humans use tools to create other tools - that is, that only humans innovate by combining small, modular, commodity tools into more complex, composite, cutting-edge 'meta-tools'.

These top tools are always scarce and expensive, even though the commodity tools aren't - it's the last short period of additional innovation that makes them so expensive, and the price for this can only be brought down by manufacturing products in very large quantities (which also require extensive marketing to sell them, of course). Additionally, such tools aren't going to be shared with others, since they constitute a manufacturer's source of competitive advantage over their competitors.

But how about intellectual tools? Here, too, there is a very long history of moving from simple to more complex tools, all the way from the invention of writing to the development of a plethora of scientific disciplines. Here, however, the free sharing of tools (of ideas) is paramount, but these tools often exist at a very high degree of abstraction, and therefore do not necessarily lead to their use in further innovation. The fundamental process of such innovation, where it takes place, is copy, paste, edit - and yet, the industries dealing most centrally with ideas are conventionally understood as the copyright industries, and actively fight this copy, past, edit logic.

Which is why we've seen the emergence of shared, openly accessible tool stacks, for example through the efforts of open source software development - but also the establishment of commercial services utilising such technology. From a big picture perspective, such services add only a small layer of additional technology to the layers of very complex tools upon which they build (a small amount of Web design to tens of thousands of person-hours which led to the development of TCP/IP, HTML, AJAX, and other enabling technologies, for example).

Such development relies on the existence of infrastructures and ecosystems within which such new, innovative tools and services can operate (and a brutal battle continues for control of this tool stack - witness the fight over HTML standards, over Java, and over many other such technologies). Within this ecosystem, we - but also everyone else in the world - have a chance to build amazing new things (increasingly also including physical objects); this also leads to strong competition for users, which will be won by those who best accommodate the needs and wants of their users. This also raises questions over pricing strategies and marketing approaches (Google or Amazon have never needed to advertise to attract users, for example), of course. And there's a need to be hybrid: Matthias points here for example to the iPhone application store, which provides a space for offering non-physical services utilising a specific piece of hardware.

The major pattern of behaviour in this shared tools world, then, Matthias concludes, is creating things.

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