Innovation Peer Pressures

heathers_5

Could the geographic proximity of Twitter to Facebook and vice-versa be hurting each other’s development as they shadowbox over how users update status?

A good deal of modern American upbringing is teaching awareness of (and mostly resistance to) peer pressure.   Fiction has no shortage of such tales, and in quantitative Asch Conformity Experiments we know it’s real: people appear to deliberately trump their judgments to give wrong answers more in conformity with what others have answered before.   Peer pressure can of course have its benefits.  One is production itself — to keep up with the Joneses; it is a solvent to the instinct for resting on ones laurels, and almost a synonym for creative destruction.  The downside is conformity, keeping up with the Heathers.

I think it was either Paul Graham or Eric Ries (or someone else?  Let me know!) who said start ups shouldn’t live in San Francisco because you spend too much time going to parties listening to other people’s business plans.  This was expressed as a concern for the time waste, but I think the greater peril is the subtle gravity it effects on ones own business plan.   Ironically, the further away companies are from the center of the activity mass,  the more innovative I’ve found their product to be.  There is some selection bias in my sample, but even so, these far-flung companies tend to be less confident about the absolute prospects of their product.

Continue reading Innovation Peer Pressures