A couple of days ago I wrote a little (very little) about Stewart Brand’s 🖇️ Pace layer. It’s worth clicking through - not just to my short piece, but in turn the links in that post.

Still - to the point.

Andy Hamilton dropped a post on LinkedIN a couple of days ago referencing an Australian report called ‘Barriers to collaboartion and commercialization’ asking if there were lessons that can be learned fro New Zealand. And so ‘the people’ weighed in - with the inevitable group waxing lyrical about business and government working hand in hand to innovate and become world leaders in ….

Pipe dreams - and ‘Pace Layers’, illustrated above explain why.

The model was developed by Stewart Brand and Brian Eno of all people. A quick study will reveal why government involvement in innovation is flawed. If you are still missing the challenge comes down to the

The order of a healthy civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.

💬 Stewart Brand

It reminds me of something 🔗 Venkatesh Rao wrote about many years ago - and which I in turn referenced in my 🔗 book a couple of years ago.

Bottom Line

I have always had a fundamental problem with government being joined at the hip with business. In principle, it sounds lovely. It can work. It does work … but not if you want to be fast, innovative, different, leading edge, using new technologies - all of these things are not part of a government’s DNA - the pace layer model reveals why it won’t work.

Whatever speed government works at, it still wont be fast enough for business and if you slow down business to more readily accommodate government, then others will beat you to market.

Just three case studies out of the hundreds if not thousands just in the software industry; Uber, AirBNB and Facebook.

And don’t get me started on Tesla, The Boring Compnay, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink and the rest of the ‘Musk Suite.

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