Pirates are essential to innovation
All great inventions, all great ideas started with a leap of faith, a grain of foolishness maybe, and some stubbornness to sustain a project despite everyone believing the opposite.
All great inventions, if they are truly extraordinary, they change the world as it was known before, by re-defying space, time, and above all laws and models.
All great inventions need pirates.
Take the airplane invention for example.
The airplane invention didn’t only change the way we travel, and subsequently how we interact to one another, but also redefined the idea of property in the American traditions .
The airplane invention was used as an example by Lawrence Lessig in “Free Culture. How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity”, to explain how the very fundamental concept of property was redefined by a technological invention.
Before the Wright brother flew their first self-propelled vehicle into the air for only thirty seconds, American common law held that property owners, owned their land “from the depths to the heavens”, including all rights to water, oil, gas, and other minerals underground, and over.
Then the airplane came and the Congress issued the Air Commerce Act in which it is stated that any citizen of the United States has the public right of freedom of transit in air commerce through the navigable air space of the United States. All of a sudden, laws that had been valuable for centuries just weren’t anymore.
This led into a famous Supreme Court Case “United States v Causby 328 US 256 (1946)”in which two North Carolina farmers decided to take the local airport to court with the claim that the airplanes were trespassing their property and destroying their poultry business.
The United States Supreme Court held in this case stating:
It is ancient doctrine that at common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe – cujus est solum ejus est usque et coelum. But that doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea.
Commons sense of the modern world, as opposed to the one of the time when the constitution was written, redefined the concept of property in the United States law, stating one more time how inventions can be powerful enough to even redefine what the society as a whole would agreed on.
Something similar and in a way more radical has happened since the early days of Silicon Valley, and has followed us from the beginning of electronic and computer industry till the current era of the Internet and information technology.
The latest 50 years of the 20th century have in fact seen an incredible amount of inventions that have shaped and reinvented the market to the point where being able to adapt quickly, and recognize opportunities, threats and sometimes favourable social trends has become vital for individual and organizations alike.
These ideas are also explored in the following article by Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón: “Plunder Your Way to Innovation - The future language of business isn’t English or Chinese. It’s Pirate”.
Being a pirate in such a contest means being able to have enough entrepreneurial spirit and capacity to explore yourself and your organization, the market and its customers, with objectiveness, identifying your own strengths and weaknesses and taking advantage of both.
A pirate would also analyse the current business models to create better ones for the future, by always and constantly reinventing and enhancing their strategy to capture some kind of advantage.
A pirate would ultimately use the advantage acquired to create something new and in a way revolutionary.
All the big companies in the IT sector started after all with a pirate story full of pathos and drama. Innovative companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Ebay, Dell and even nowadays Facebook, have often been described as pirate ships full of buccaneers armed to the teeth and ready to assault the competition: like pirates hiding in the fog, these innovators find their competitors weakness where they don’t even know to exist.
Yet, even with their often unconventional approaches to business, these companies have often come from nowhere to dominate their markets by seeing something that was long overlooked by their competitors, and hence redefining how their industries operate.
