Charles Leadbetter talks about collaboration: is the future about working together?

PSFK has posted an interesting review of Charles Leadbeater’s speech at Picnic 08 (read it here). As Brand Strategy has been lucky enough to see Charles in action a few times, we know that he’s always good at summing up complex ideas with many strands in easy-to-understand ways.

In this speech, Charles talked about the media environment that might emerge over the next 10 years. He called large, traditional media companies ‘boulders’ and suggested they might disappear in favour of smaller content contributions from many people or ‘pebbles’. These pebbles will take the form of video clips, encyclopedia entries and blog posts.

But while all these pebbles are interesting, Charles says that it is the resulting content and its usefulness that will really matter. They need to help create something, whether this is open-source gaming, encyclopedias or other resources. He gave the example of the ‘I love bees’ game (see the official website here) to promote Halo 2 where 600,000 people tried to solve a puzzle together as an example of really sophisticated collaboration.

Leadbetter then went on to talk about how science and the way that scientists collaborate is a guide to the future of media. He explained how young scientists are using collaborative techniques on a daily basis to run experiments, share data and simulate outcomes. When their papers are published, they often end up being hosted digitally so the information can be easily transfered between people.

Do you think that collaboration is the future? How do you see it working? Let us know. (And thank you, PSFK, for tipping us off about this….).