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The Death of Trade Secrets |
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cool guy |
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2009-02-17 오후 2:59:22 |
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The Death of Trade Secrets
To survive the changing business environment and contend with technological upheavals, printing businesses must assess and promote the value of what they do rather than simply focus on product and process.
By Mark A. Coudray (2009-01-09)
I’ve long been fascinated with exponential expansions of information and incredible rates of growth. I’ve had an opportunity over the past few months to look at these subjects, which I discussed in the September 2008 edition of Screen Printing, much more closely and consider the implications they have for garment and graphics screen printers, as well as digital printers. The speed at which knowledge expands changes everything we know about past practices and about how we run our businesses. But this isn’t unique to us. Other industries and segments are facing even greater and more radical disruptions.
Observation of the phenomenon of exponential knowledge expansion—and the dilemma exponential knowledge growth poses—has been documented in scientific papers as far back as 1981. We, of course, have been too focused on the disruptive technologies in our industry and how they’ve affected our lives to have noticed. I would like to look closely at what this means to us from the familiar perspective of learning a craft or trade, and then guarding that knowledge as a protected trade secret. I chose this perspective because our industry is notorious for harboring such a condition.
Craftsman-guild model
When knowledge was difficult to obtain and books were nonexistent, the trades and crafts protected their value by keeping their methods secret and passing knowledge by word of mouth. This is where the term trade secret originated. While the term most likely comes from Western Europe in the 1300-1400s, the first evidence of trade guilds goes back as far as the Dark Ages, around 800 AD. More importantly, knowledge was very rare and if you had it, you protected it and did not share it for risk of losing your advantage. If you were the only one who had it, you would have value and you would always have work.
This approach to knowledge was based on scarcity. During this period it was indeed possible to learn every recorded piece of knowledge—a situation common among scholars and monks. Knowledge was scarce and often held in higher esteem than gold.
Fast forward to today. We still operate with a Medieval mentality. We are well on our way out of the Industrial Era and are mostly out of the Service Economy and onto the Knowledge Economy. Or so we are told by the experts. Any of us who has recently been on a manufacturer’s production floor know this simply is not the case. The production workers still harbor the scarcity model and are extremely reluctant to learn new things or share what they do know. To make matters worse, they resist change in the futile hope that all of the new stuff will just somehow fade away and they won’t have to deal with it.
They are correct to some degree. Take learning digital art for instance. The transition over the last two decades to vector-art creation caused analog artists to completely abandon their traditional drawing and painting methods and learn a new way of creating art—a way that’s easier for the computer to address, but harder for the creator to adjust to. In fact, the interface with the computer has been anything but creative and intuitive. That’s all changing as processing power is now so vast that the entire human interface with the machine is dissolving. In just a few more years, the artists will be back to creating without the annoying and disruptive keyboard, mouse, and computer interface to spoil their creativity. Need evidence? Look at how far digital tablets have come. They are much more natural today, supporting pressure, angle, pencil, and brush behaviors.
Life cycle
The life cycle of any product or market goes through four distinct phases. They are invention, invention extensi |
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