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Quotable: Joi Ito

Joi Ito is head of MIT’s Media Lab. In a recent interview with Wired, Ito talks about disruption—the creation of new markets via the disturbance of existing, set market structures. Here are the highlights:

On innovation: The amount of money, and the amount of permission that you need to create an idea has decreased dramatically, whether it’s Wikipedia, Yahoo, Facebook, or Google. They didn’t have to ask for permission, they didn’t even need to raise money to do it, they just did it. That pushes innovation to the edges so you no longer need money, power and control to innovate.

On cost-to-launch: Being able to do shit without money is a tremendously important thing. Whether you are talking about venture startups, nonprofits, a civic action, the overthrow of dictators, it all comes from diminishing the cost of access, and diminishing the cost of innovation.

Ito’s nine principles:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.

2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.

3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.

4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.

5. You want to have good compasses not maps.

6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.

7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.

8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.

9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.