No Pressure

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 20^th 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.

A modern Pirate.

The English term Pirate is derived from the latin word Pirata and from the greek word πειρατής” (peiratēs), “brigand”,in turn from “πειράομαι” (peiráomai), “attempt”, which as well comes from “πεῖρα” (peîra), “attempt, experience”. Nor the word attempt or experience can be found in the modern image that we have of pirates. Nor attempt or experience contains a negative connotation, instead when we think about piracy, we always have a negative image, or maybe we are just simply influenced by the stereotypes derived from Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Nevertheless most of the times piracy is something presented as stealing, as being in constant conflicts with the status quo and the existing laws.

While this concept of the pirate as almost a romantic hero always in contrast with the society can still be considered true in some cases, nowadays piracy is more a mind-set, an idea that survival – let alone victory – depends on one entrepreneurial spirit and capacity to constantly reinvent and enhance, and to finally keep or capture an advantage on your competitors.

Pirates carry the spirit of innovation that is at the hearth of the information economy and our modern society, where opportunities and threats occur unpredictably, where companies (like pirates) need to reinvent themselves to be able to dominate their markets and find those favourable circumstances overlooked by their competitors.

The history of Silicon Valley itself is full of drama and pirates that have revolutionized the market several times, and as well full of companies started as small-time operators, in the garages and the backyards (sometimes even dorm rooms), like someone that would sell art and craft on the side of the road.

But one time innovator becomes often quickly a giant that would try to cut out the small and individual initiatives. Once a firm becomes established, it will try to restrict innovation on the market in order to maintain its profit. Innovation in this scenario is a shift of power, something that is bad for the established players but extremely good for the small player trying to enter the market.

Innovation is hence a self-destructive force, which needs to be acted upon quickly. It shakes the foundations of the market rules by fundamentally changing it, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  The small player will try to evolve their business and find new ideas, the bigger firms will try to lock down access to the market itself as with only a few players in the market the power shifts away from the consumers and towards the suppliers.

Pirates are innovators who sail uncharted waters by thinking out of the box, create their own vehicle (or platform in technological terms), establish new models and definitions, harness their audience and ultimately change the world.