Does this happen in developing markets like Dubai, as well as in developed ones?

The key point for Dubai is that there are policies involved that can make this possible, such as making Internet access really cheap and creating easy collaboration tools, making it easy to work together. It’s important to make collaboration among users in the design area cheap.

What does that mean for intellectual property policies?

A lot of things governments do when they support the manufacture-centered innovation model - which is now dying - are against the user-centered model. When you have things like really strong intellectual property rights, when you really push patenting … this policy of supporting the IP regime impedes the common interest. Each institutional regime tends to build around itself the infrastructure it needs to thrive.

Manufacturers are not direct users because they don’t directly profit, so they need strong IP. Governments have come along and progressively made it stronger, and built up other policies like R&D subsidies and so on. With this user-centered innovation coming along, where users collaborate openly, we need a change in policy.

What role does education play in this process?

Education is built around the way things traditionally work - so business schools are designed around the traditional manufacture-centered model, and that has to change, too.

The Gulf states tend to score high in terms of adopting new communication technologies, but they fall short in other areas like education. What are the implications of this?

If you don’t have a population of innovators, then there’s no one participating in this collaborative net. It’s wonderful that you built the collaborative net, but you certainly need the technology-enabled users who can exploit it. The Internet is like the roads of the modern age. So if you think about in the old days, i.e. why people built roads to markets, initially roads were private.

One town would build roads for itself, and nobody would support the inter-town connections. Then government came along and said this is important to make markets work. Farmers had to get their crops to market - so there had to be farmers in order for there to be roads. The same is the case here: you’re building the roads but you have to have people able to do the technology designing - the information freight that goes on those roads. 

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