Innovation in America, and Silicon Valley in particular, has never waited for permission. The ease of starting companies, the low barriers to accessing capital, and (of course) the existence of an open and free internet on which anyone can build anything have all been major contributors to the vitality of Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry, which permeates nearly everyone’s daily life. The most successful companies of our time — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more — didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to innovate. They didn’t have to explain their businesses and get special licenses. They just came up with an idea and built it.
This is important.
Last week, we talked about our philosophy of hacking policy through innovation, not lobbying. This week, we’re inviting everyone to get involved in one example of this philosophy in action.
In this world of rapid technological innovation, nobody can truly claim their efforts stand alone. Everything is built upon previous innovations, and everyone benefits from those who took a pro-innovation stance when building their businesses and technologies. Today, everyone bears some of the responsibility for ensuring that we continue to promote innovation rather than stymie it, and it’s to that end that Copia is creating the Statement of Innovation Principles: a clear, robust statement for innovative companies to sign on to, laying out a variety of principles that they intend to uphold in order to promote future innovation, ranging from how they deal with data and intellectual property to how they structure their APIs and developers’ kits.
We know that most startups don’t have time to sit down and hash out policies for every single eventuality, and that’s why we’ve created the Open Source Policy Project. We’re building a github repository, but instead of useful code and applications, it’s full of useful policy documents: flexible, modular, easily customizable material to help companies put their commitment to innovation into words. For those that sign on to our Statement of Innovation Principles, it serves as a toolkit to help realize the Principles in full; for everyone, it’s a resource that we hope will make these important but challenging policy discussions easier to tackle.
In this world of rapid technological innovation, nobody can truly claim their efforts stand alone. Everything is built upon innovations that came before it, and everything has benefited from those who took a pro-innovation stance when building their businesses and technologies. Today, everyone bears some of the responsibility for ensuring that we continue to promote innovation rather than stymie it, and it’s to that end that Copia is creating the Statement of Innovation Principles.
Today, everyone bears some of the responsibility for ensuring that we continue to promote innovation rather than stymie it, and it’s to that end that Copia is creating the Statement of Innovation Principles. To kick off this ongoing project, we hosted this roundtable with the General Counsels of innovative companies at the 2015 Copia Inaugural Summit to discuss our initial draft of the Statement.
Roundtable Participants: Vijaya Gadde (Twitter), Blake Lawit (LinkedIn), Bart Volkmer (Dropbox), Denelle Dixon-Thayer (Mozilla), Ken Carter (Cloudflare), Paul Sieminski (Automattic), Liz Simon (General Assembly)
