Wikipedia: monopoly

When we usually think of monopolies, we think of for-profit corporate companies. For instance, Microsoft, at a certain point, had a near-monopoly on operating systems software (today, there is significant competition from Linux, Apple and many others). The monopoly didn’t materialize. In a similar manner, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, currently has a near monopoly on the encyclopedia business. Again, the monopoly isn’t likely to materialize, but it does give some very clear lessons on how to try monopolizing.

1. Create strong disincentives for competition: Wikipedia has done this in two ways. The first is that it’s free, easy to access, and ad-free. It’s run by a nonprofit organization. This means that competitors aren’t naturally excited about competing with it. I mean, how do you get cheaper than free? It’s a hard question and definitely not an attraction for budding competitors.

   More importantly, Wikipedia works by simply making competition seem silly, and that’s where its “anybody can edit” comes in. Ordinarily, when a big company starts off with a closed system that’s highly popular, other companies want to emulate that system, or provide a comparable system, to increase diversity. But Wikipedia literally made it appear as if people seeking diversity were party-poopers. Instead of trying to start something else, why don’t you go and edit on Wikipedia? Nice way of discouraging competition.

2. Keep costs low. Emphasize costs over quality. Outsource. And to top it all, appear virtuous about it: Wikipedia is built almost entirely on volunteer labor. Most of the labor goes unpaid. Most of our contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation don’t go to all the people who worked hard over all the articles. They go to just pay for the servers, and pay for a few people who are managing the project. Simply speaking, Wikipedia isn’t sustainable if it starts paying people for the tremendous work that goes into writing quality entries.

   But the genius of this has been to turn this apparent drawback: that Wikipedia can’t compensate people for their tremendous effort, into a virtue. Contribute to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and achieve immortality as somebody who wanted to share knowledge for free. The moral boost is certainly better than working to write a book or journal article at a miserable rate of under $1 per hour. And it’s certainly great for people who’d otherwise never write anything at all.

   And when it comes to questions about whether anonymous editing is responsible for vandalism, Wikipedia’s clear about one thing: nothing should be done to raise the barrier to editing. Anonymous editing is a small price we pay for the tremendous amount of volunteer labor that can be tapped into. Like Walmart, keeping costs low is the top priority, no matter where the supplies come from. The human cost of editors getting disgusted with edit wars, or of people’s biographies getting disrupted by malice is small compared to the benefits of providing people with cheap, nay, free stuff.

3. Be there first, and bear the losses: Simple, and mind-blowing idea: build a free encyclopedia. Laughable? Still, doesn’t hurt to try. Wikipedia became this free encyclopedia even though Encyclopedia Britannica, after trying to have its encyclopedia entries online, had been unable to cope with the traffic loads. But Wikipedia persevered.
4. Choose a killer license: Licenses certainly help. Patents and restrictive copyright licenses are one way to go. But copyleft licensing is the other way to go. By adopting the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia’s winning friends and shooting down enemies. First, Wikipedia wins all the people who’ve mouthed the words “free” and “open” as the new catch-words. We have Richard Stallman abandoning GNUPedia to whole-heartedly endorse Wikipedia. And then, aren’t our volunteers touched that their no-rewards effort will be under a license that’ll allow anybody to reproduce the stuff?

   Secondly, the killer license means that any competitor is, almost by force, chosen to adopt a similar license, if they want to attract the same kind of love and attention. But the great thing about the license is that you can copy back from them. So any competitor to Wikipedia can be absorbed by Wikipedia in a single swallow. Merger? No, you don’t even need to consult the competitor before absorbing them.

   Wikipedia’s recently been making bigger moves. With the advent of Creative Commons, the move forward for Wikipedia is clear. Convert Wikipedia’s GFDL into CC. True, this’ll require a bit of rewriting, but it means Wikipedia’s suddenly won over the support and endorsement of CC. Good for Wikipedia, because CC has around 50 million products under its licenses. Good for both parties, in fact, because this suddenly means an additional 10 million articles for CC, and makes Wikipedia part of the “share, remix and reuse” culture. Not surprisingly, Larry Lessig, the author of Code v 2 (a great book that everybody should read), dedicates the book to Wikipedia.

Hmmm. Reminded of Microsoft, Walmart, and Google? Money really isn’t the only route to power, apparently. It’s about fame and clicks, and winning over the hearts of people who have the right ideological mindset.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a criticism of Wikipedia (apologies if it appeared that way). And while I’m at it, let me mention a few things commonly attributed to Wikipedia’s success, that, in my opinion, have very little to do with its success.

1. An open and collaborative process: A large number of Wikipedia’s editors are anonymous users, and even the logged-in users rarely disclose their real names or affiliations, even in articles where a clear conflict of interest could develop. The process that goes into article creation and the many discussion points are rarely put forward in a palatable manner, that people who come to the article can read and understand. Very few people actually collaborate and discuss the many facets of article structuring. Rather, it’s just a sequence of one edit after another, which includes reverting past edits, unreverting them, putting up articles for deletion, flagging articles that violate NPOV, and so on. Not exactly the ideal collaborative process, and far from open. To top it all, whenever an article starts to feel the heat, administrators emerge and make arbitrary decisions about the fate of the article.
2. The wiki model: The wiki model is cool for collaboration, and certainly the best I’ve seen so far, and my admiration goes for Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, and the many others who have worked to make the software better over the years. However, the wiki model isn’t in itself responsible for magic. I think this is best seen in the fact that a lot of places have tried to adopt the wiki approach and it has failed. Most notably, some of Wikipedia’s sister sites, that include Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, and Wikiversity, are still growing at a remarkably slow rate.
3. A cohort of exceptionally minded and brilliantly talented people at the center who coordinate the efforts of volunteers in a great way to maintain an exceptional encyclopedia: Hardly. There are some administrators at the center of Wikipedia, and some of them are doing a good job (though by no means all). But there’s little evidence to suggest that the core body of administrators has worked to push through new and innovative initiatives, or to handle many of Wikipedia’s pressing problems, efficiently and creatively. Most of the administrators are people who have little by way of solid experience in the skills of organizing knowledge and ideas before they joined Wikipedia, and in fact many of them have very little “cool stuff” to boast of even re: their activities in Wikipedia (unless you count banning members, knowing the rulebook of NPOV and NN, and winning AfD debates as cool stuff).

What gives? Why do I think Wikipedia will be unable to sustain its monopoly? First, there’s the repeated scandals confronting the Wikimedia Foundation, many of which are summarized well at Wikipedia Watch and Wikitruth.info. But, whether or not you pay importance to these scandals, the key point is that in the recent past, Wikipedia has systematically failed to innovated. There have been innovations and improvements from the software side, but the community has failed to become more organized, and the encyclopedia continues to be edited in a reactionary and patched fashion rather than addressing core issues.

Secondly, it’s clear that the Wikimedia Foundation continues to steadfastly believe in the magic of wikis, with the growth of projects like Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity. Ironically, many of these have better design than Wikipedia, yet that lack the key elements that Wikipedia had: it was first in, and it stood brave. Had Encyclopedia Britannica been completely online and incorporated user feedback in an easy way, Wikipedia might never have taken off the way it did. As it stands, Wikinews is a singularly unattractive proposition when practically all the print and television news channels put up the bulk of their stuff for free over the Internet, and are complemented by the blogosphere. This doesn’t mean it can never grow. It probably will grow, if it’s fundamentals are in the right place. But it cannot acquire the monopoly that the Wikipedia did, juts because it is “free”.

Similarly, wikisource may be a cool place to locate the source for books in the public domain, but who’d bother when there’s Google Books and many other ways to get the books? Wikisource has to offer something new and something distinctive. And who’d want to go to Wikiversity when there are resources like MIT Open CourseWare and Connexions? In fact, the Wikimedia Foundation itself seems to have decided that promoting these other projects is a non-starter, so it’s living with their tortoise-pace growth as it continues to allow media attention to shower on Wikipedia.

More importantly, competition to Wikipedia has begun in real earnest now. Most of the initial competition to Wikipedia was reactionary: let’s monetize the model by using Wikipedia content with ads. Then came Scholarpedia and the Digital Universe. Though neither took off dramatically, they were at least somewhat well-planned. And finally, we have a serious contender to Wikipedia: the Citizendium. With 6000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 2.7 million, the Citizendium doesn’t quite look formidable yet. However, they have a sense of community and a vision for the future, and they’re not blindly aping “what worked” for Wikipedia. Rather, careful thought is being given to redesigning fundamentals. It remains to be seen where the Citizendium goes.

Finally, there’s Google Knol. This is the Google idea of having “units of knowledge”. People write signed articles, that are the first thing anybody searching on the subject should read. Needless to say, Google’s search engine will help readers reach this first thing. My guess is that Google is finding the Knol fairly hard to implement, which is why we haven’t heard from from them since December 12, 2007, when they first officially announced it. But if they do manage to get the balance right, it could be an important alternative knowledge source for people.

In other words, you can become a monopoly in anything: provided the conditions are right. Profit, restrictive licensing, or closed code isn’t necessary to achieve monopolistic control. But maintaining a monopoly requires something more than just what is needed to create it. To maintain a monopoly, one needs to constantly innovate and provide solutions to the core weaknesses rather than be reactionary and do patch-fixing. This is something Wikipedia has failed to do, and it remains to be seen how long it is before they’re displaced from the top.

Web 2.0: The promise it has yet to fulfil

At the time I was in high school, the Internet, at least in India, had not taken off. I had Internet access at home on a slow dial-up connection. Going online was not impossible, but it was still an expensive business.

At that time, I had a number of ideas and dreams. I was fond of composing music (something that I did using a PC software that I managed to acquire through my aunt). I was fond of mathematics, and I was fortunate to receive guidance and information that helped me prepare for the Olympiads: something that helped shape my career in mathematics. But by and large, all the little dreams, ideas and aspirations that I had didn’t get to fruition, simply because tools like the Internet that enable easy access to information and the quick ability to publish, weren’t around.

What I hoped at the time was not just to have the ability to easily access information and share ideas and network, but also the ability to easily and effectively learn more skills, get more experience, and become better at more things.

In came the Internet. In my undergraduate college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality. By the time I finished college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality everywhere I went. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Blogger and WordPress. Youtube and Flickr. Unlimited free email storage. Free text and voice chatting. The ability to find information, share ideas and publish for virtually no cost.

And yet, the Internet is yet to live up to its bigger promise to me: the ability to provide people who do not have the resources, skills or contacts for a job, with those resources, skills or contacts. The ability to easily facilitate the identification of truly skilled people among the myriad amateurs of the Internet. The ability to offer everybody the ability to improve and build their skills, to learn from their surroundings.

Publishing directly to the people

Publishing a book with a reputed publisher — what does that involve? First, publishers often have niches on what kind of stuff they’ll publish, and quotas for how much. So if you don’t fit the niche or quota, sorry. Secondly, since they have limited resources of how much they can devote editorial and marketing effort to, your stuff has to be “good” by their standards. Thirdly, even if you write a cool manuscript, they’re likely to subject it to intensive rounds of editing to conform to their idea of how a book should look to sell, before publishing it.

In other words, publishers need to make sure the stuff they publish is good, because there are limits on how much they can publish. “Good”, of course, is by their own standards, and the flipside of this is that it could be hard for new authors to write books on topics that the publishers aren’t convinced will sell, however good the book is.

On the other hand, it also means that the process of writing a book, and getting a published, could be a learning and challenging experience, where the author learns the intricacies and details of editing, and learns exactly what the publishers think will sell (and indirectly, what good writing looks like). The process of getting rejects, however disheartening, could still be a guide to authors that helps them improve and finetune their work. In other words, at the end of having a book published, the author is actually much further along the way in terms of skills and abilities, than he/she was at the time of starting to write. Moreover, the sheer fact that people will look at the book and decide whether to publish it, means that the author needs to tune these factors in at the start.

What does blogging and self-publishing offer, in contrast? Blogging means you can publish anything you write at any time you want. Great. Secondly, since you aren’t actually charging people for reading your blog, trying to write stuff that readers will consider “worth their money” doesn’t need to be your priority. On the one hand, this allows creative freedom to explore topics that one is not convinced will sell. On the other hand, it means greater indifference to the needs of readers and greater concern for whatever comes to one’s mind at the moment.

This doesn’t have to be the case with blogging. In other words, it is perfectly possible for bloggers to be just as careful about the quality of their writing, and just as sensitive to the needs of readers, as people writing in traditional media are. In fact, some of the best bloggers do exactly that. A classical example that comes to mind is Steve Pavlina, who runs a website on personal development. But as he makes amply clear in his posts, he’s not merely a blogger. Writing about personal development is his business. It’s just as important to him even if he has to edit and publish himself.

Ironically, though the blogosphere apparently levels the playing field for all to write, the best bloggers continue to be people who have acquired their skills for analytical writing and expression as well as their ideas, from other experience, be it in academia or industry. Some of these people have written published books, many have done Ph.D.s, many have worked in magazines and many have worked in professions that involve a lot of writing. I haven’t encountered many people who’ve just started blogging on day one and become greater bloggers by day hundred.

But why?

The reason is simple: the blogosphere provides tools that allow people to directly publish without going through the rigmarole and process of traditional publishing, yet it does not so readily provide tools that help people transcend from being direct publishers of off-the-cuff thoughts, to people who can refine and reformulate arguments, conduct solid research, coordinate different streams of thought, and come up with a cogent, well-established position. It’s not that these are very hard for bloggers to do. But the incentive system doesn’t encourage this. This means that blogging has allowed the amateurs (like me) to publish, but it has not empowered the amateurs, at least in a prominent way, to improve and polish their writing skills.

Youtube allows anybody to upload videos. But how easy and friendly is the world to people trying to learn how to create a video? It’s easy to put up songs for free. But how easy is it to create a song? Certainly the software and hardware needed for the creation, as well as books and resources that could help in making videos and music, are more easily available. Yet, this difference is in no way at the stage where amateurs can, in large numbers, dabble with creating videos and music and where they can progressively improve to the point where they could become professionals. I’m speaking specifically about people who do not have the right contacts or levels of money needed to access advanced and specialized resources.

There are interests and reasons behind this

The traditional publishing economy was based, at least in part on the premise: sell a few things, and sell them one. Select well, hone and sell. Two problems with this are: often, the publishers may not predict very well what the market really wants, or would love. Secondly, a whole range of medium-level stuff fails to reach the kind of wide audiences it needs.

With free online publishing, both these have changed. Good stuff can now come up even if certain people in authority do not consider it good. And middle-level stuff, that some people might find good, can still come up now. But there’s a flip side to the free online publishing model, and that’s its economics.

That’s the economics of advertising. Google is currently the market leader in advertising, and the typical premise of advertising is: more eyeballs, more clicks. This means that content creators who’re trying to earn money through writing, earn more money if they get more eyeballs and more clicks. Which is similar to selling more copies: but different in various ways. Firstly, it is not at all necessary for people to buy content to view it. This means that you don’t need your stuff to be “good” or “useful” for people to actually shill out money. On the other hand, your stuff should be prominently linked to, and easy to find. So the economics entails commenting on other people’s blogs, using pingbacks, and various search engine optimization techniques to come up high when people search on certain topics. If the traditional news media is encouraged to use hype to catch people’s attention, the blogging industry need not be completely different.

More importantly, giant companies like Google, frankly, aren’t bothered about bad content. They don’t mind good content, but more importantly than content being good or bad, they want lots of content, and lots of people to spend lots of time reading that content. More readers means more eyeballs and more clicks. This means that the dynamic is to get a lot of people to participate and to keep the barriers to publishing and creating stuff as low as possible. So, do tools that encourage people to seek the help of more experienced bloggers for feedback on blog style and content get attention in people constructing blogging platforms? Not to a large extent. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter. What counts is a huge and diverse blogosphere. Picking and honing good bloggers and helping them scale the ladder to writing more impactful and professional pieces isn’t value for money.

This isn’t limited to blogging. What current web-based companies are concentrating on is giving publishing tools to more people. Giving tools to edit and create better content, and to learn how to produce better content, aren’t on their priority list.

This isn’t to underestimate the number of such tools available. There are many writing groups, and many groups and mailing lists by people seeking to be professionals in an area. But they aren’t as ubiquitous or accessible as the good old “write, and click publish” sites.

Content publishers and distributors have the responsibility to educate

A video hosting service like Youtube or a torrent service that allows file exchange, has the responsibility to make it easier for people uploading and using videos to understand issues of copyright, reuse and piracy, and to mark their works clearly in this regard. This doesn’t mean they are liable for every misuse of their service for piracy or plagiarism. But they need to provide people the resources and incentives to understand the current structure and architecture of law.

Come to think of it, providing such information and services isn’t extraordinarily hard. Yet, the reaction of a number of modern-day web-based publishing companies to copyright and legal issues has been to ignore them till they are threatened with legal action, at which point they react by pulling off video content.

An encyclopedia like Wikipedia, that relies largely on the labor of volunteers, has the responsibility to explain to incoming volunteers exactly what they are in for, how people have worked on the encyclopedia, what they can do to help. The typical experience on Wikipedia is Wanna edit? Go ahead — at your own risk. Wikipedia administrators and bureaucracy literally shuts off dissidents and people who complain about article content — but when it comes to being threatened with legal action, Jimbo Wales eagerly complies by suddenly blocking the article and taking it offline.

Google Books has done a great good by scanning a number of books, making their contents searchable, but this was again done with the “shoot first, apologize later” attitude. Namely, scan the contents of books, and then, if an author wants the scan not to be publicly visible, the author must request. Google made it plain that contacting authors for permission wasn’t worth their effort. Not worth their effort? Currently Google has come up with a more balanced approach.

Critics of “Web 1.0″ are quick to point out how much Web 2.0 has empowered individuals as opposed to the big corporations. This is true in some senses — but the biggest potential has yet to be achieved. All it’s done is created a parallel production system. You can read an article on Wikipedia. Or you can spend $100 to buy a book written with years of labor on the subject (the third option, that you get a pirated edition of the book, is out of bounds). Web 2.0 has largely been a time of dichotomies, rather than what I hoped for: a way for people who do not have contacts or resources, to gradually build the knowledge and skills needed to produce quality content.

Creative Commons: How creative and how much of the commons?

One of the great movements that in my view shows the power that Web 2.0 can fulfil is that Creative Commons movement. Creative Commons offers a range of licenses that allow authors to specify redistribution rights with certain restrictions. For instance, I can specify that people can reuse my work and create derivative works, as long as they share alike and use a compatible license. More importantly, the Creative Commons is working towards creating a culture of sharing.

I hope the emphasis on both words: “creative” and “commons”, continues, and that the Creative Commons movement does not simply turn into a slogan for content distributors, but remains, at its heart, a movement of people creating and using content. The troubling thing is that many of the advocates of “free” stuff in general miss the point of creativity: it is somehow assumed that making stuff free of cost, and free to reuse, is a kind of magic cure. In fact, it is important to provide people the incentive systems needed to constantly work on improving content and ideas and to constantly innovate. Having a rich and vibrant commons (something that anybody can reuse without permission or payment) is a crucial part of this. But it’s only one part. On the one hand, there are systems like the Linux operating system that, by and large, have been great successes. On the other hand, there are things like Wikipedia that have been mixed successes. What scares me is that some advocates of a commons seem to view “commons” and “free” as magic words and are therefore blind to the glaring problems with an institution like Wikipedia.

Let us bring our virtual and real existence closer together

Rather than treat online life as a kind of escape mechanism from real life, and view it as a place where we can get away with low-quality, off-the-cuff stuff, we should view it as something that enriches and is, in turn, enriched by, real life. Using our real names and our real thoughts, and being frank and open in online interactions could be a first step. Rather than think of online phenomena like Wikipedia as distinct from the traditional published books, let us work more towards bringing the best ideals of quality, rework and constant refinement into the online world.

This is not to say that instant publishing is not important (after all this blog wouldn’t get published in any traditional medium). Rather, it is to say that there is a continuum of choices between instant publishing and the full rigmarole of traditional publishing. And in fact, the technologies of the Internet can mean that one can actually publish comparable high-quality material in much less time now, and one can network and find people who can edit and provide feedback on content and suggestions. So while the majority of bloggers who, after all, are just writing something like a diary entry, will continue to rely only on instant publishing, others who want to do more with their blog have the tools to grow.

Some recommended reading

An interesting essay by Larry Sanger on how the net changes knowledge

More on choice

In an earlier post, titled Choice: start at low cost, I talked about the potential of simple, low-cost choices, to make the small improvements we need in our day-to-day life. People who read the blog have pointed out to me that coming up with low-cost choices isn’t always easy. For one, it requires a knowledge and awareness of what choices exist. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the techniques for exploring the choices available.

Let me recount a story. A traveler once met an old lady, and wanted some food. The lady had a lot of raw materials for food in her house, but she was stingy and reluctant to offer him food. So, the traveler took out a stone from his pocket, and told the lady he’d prepare soup for both of them using that stone. The lady offered a pot, and the traveler started cooking the stone. He asked the lady for some foodstuffs to be added to the stone soup to make it better, and gradually, got the lady to add flour, potatoes, barley and milk. As the soup stewed, the lady grew more and more excited and pleased. Finally, while the lady wasn’t looking, the traveler threw out the stone. (Read the story in greater detail here.

This is an old folk tale, and at first it isn’t clear what it illustrates. Does it tell us we shouldn’t be stingy in preparing grand soups? Probably, but I think the more powerful lesson is that we often need the stone to make the soup — but finally, the stone can be thrown out. This is the classic if only — if only so-and-so were available, I’d be able to do so-and-so.

In a number of situations, the things we feel are necessary for something, are in fact only helpful in facilitating it. For instance, traveling a lot may facilitate keeping in touch with a large number of people. So one might say: if only I had the time and money to travel across the world. But travel isn’t the only way to keep in touch with people. There is the telephone, there is email, there is instant messaging, and there’s even video conferencing. Having one’s article appear in the editorial page of a newspaper is certainly a cool way to be read by loads of people. But one can also write a blog and have a lot of people read the blog. Doubtless, fewer people read a specific blog than the editorial page of a newspaper. But it’s still possible.

In all these situations, there’s a high-cost alternative: like travel, having one’s article published in an editorial page; and a low-cost solution: like keeping in touch electronically, or writing a blog. Certainly, there are advantages and aspects to the high-cost solution that aren’t available in the low-cost solution. But to think of these as permanent defects or shortcomings of the low-cost solution, is a mistake. It assumes that resources, technology, and the way we use them are severely limited. This, as I’ll argue shortly, is a fallacy, because it puts too much emphasis on things that arise by accident and conditioning rather than through intrinsic differences.

For instance, there are strong differences between face-to-face communication and online communication. In face-to-face communication, there are strong cues of tone and voice, and there are strong physical cues of facial expressions. Smileys in an instant messaging chat cannot convey the same richness of emotion as the slight changes in facial expression. More importantly, smileys can be controlled with deliberation, while facial expressions are valuable precisely because they are, in part, spontaneous and uncontrollable. Thus, a lot can be achieved with face-to-face communication that, as of now, cannot be achieved by instant messaging or email.

But here’s the interesting thing. Once one becomes aware of the shortcomings and defects of electronic communication, it is possible to rectify them. In fact, I often do this kind of dumb thought-experiment: I take a person with whom I haven’t met face to face, and I imagine a setting where I’m meeting the person face-to-face. Then I extrapolate: what all would I say to that person, and what all would that person say to me, if we couldn’t hide behind electronic communication tools? Some of my thoughts take me in wild directions, but I often come up with a few things that I realize can be said electronically; it is just that they wouldn’t occur to me to say them electronically. And I do this quite often. Why? Because I realize that having face-to-face communication with a large number of people just isn’t feasible for me in my current circumstances. But I don’t want to be limited to the kind of topics and styles of conversation that one might associate with online conversation.

What I’ve noticed is that with a few iterations of these dumb thought-experiments, I manage to become more expressive in online communication, bringing to it some (though probably not all) of the features that I cherish in face-to-face communication.

I do a similar thing with money. I’m not a millionaire, so I cannot spend all the money I want ruthlessly in every possible way I want. But I still think sometimes of all the things I’d do if I had unlimited time, or unlimited money, or some resource in unlimited quantity (which, in point of fact, I don’t). Of the many ideas that come to my mind, I then realize that a few of them can be implemented within my current constraints of time and money, and some of them, often the very best ones, can be implemented at practically no cost and very little time investment!

In other words, to come up with the low-cost solutions, it often makes sense to look at the high-cost solutions and get ideas, and then notice which of those ideas transfer to the low-cost setting. At the core of it is the idea that often the difference lies in how easily a resource facilitates something. But once we’re aware of exactly how that resource facilitates that something, we may be able to facilitate that something without having access to the resource.