Tipping Points

If you do one thing tonight: Chinese New Year party - Time Out New York

Time Out New York says: "If you do just one thing: Chinese New Year party".  What started off as a holiday party for my team, portfolio companies, and friends has mushroomed into a fabulous celebration that will benefit City Harvest.  I hope you can attend.  The door is going to be insane, so best to buy tix in advance at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/53947.  Hope to see you there!  And bring your dancing shoes!

Corporate mash-ups - Corporate crash-ups

"When Companies Do The Mash"  ponders BusinessWeek, software development is done more quickly and cheaply using off-the-shelf components, but many companies aren't doing it.  As BusinessWeek describes it, mash-ups could be viewed as replacements for offshoring of tech dev.

"Mash-ups as product" make sense to me, that is, products to be purchased shrink-wrapped or custom-ordered by corporations from vendors.

But mash-up products are the result of mash-up processes.  Those processes are something few corporations can do.  It's a cultural thing.   

Companies  also result from mash-ups.  The process of creating a start-up is often a mash-up in which technology is but one component, where prototypes of businesses are quickly assembled, disassembled, smashed, tweaked, and smushed together in an improvisational collage whose ingredients can include economic unit analysis, human capital, money, customer needs, infrastructure and entrepreneurial passion.   

This flies in the face of corporate hierarchy, tradition and education. 

The whole idea of  synergy is related to mash-ups.  Putting magazines, cable, Internet and Hollywood together is a great idea IF a culture were designed to support creatively-oriented accidents that could eventually result in an entirely new corporate model obsessively focused on addressing known and unknown customer needs.  But I guess it might not then be a Corporation.  It would be a mash-up.

It is also at the heart of capitalism.  One of its flavors was known as Creative Destruction. 

Mash-ups.  It's how we do what we do.