All The People Outside The Room

This is a great thought. 

"...until now the value of a piece of intellectual property has been defined by how few people possess it. In the future the value will be defined by how many people possess it."

In an article over the weekend, Time Magazine described how corporations, with some exceptions (e.g. YouTube and American Idol), have been slow to harness the power of the people.  Not that new or interesting.

But the interesting part, I  thought, came when they explained the slightly obvious idea that the people who used to control innovation and creativity were inside organizations and corporations and the masses were happy to buy what the corporations invented.  They went on to label the corporations and the people that worked for them as the small elite "inside the room" and that in the future, the people who will control creativity and innovation are the much larger elite "outside the room" - or all of us.

This "outside the room" vs. "inside the room" framework seems like a much more interesting way to describing collaboration and authorship than the terms the ad industry seems to favor like "co-creation" or "democracy."