Give it away, give it away, give it away now!

If, like me, you lived through a Red Hot Chilli Pepper concert in the 90’s and saw Flea with his kit off you will be able to place the pop culture reference in my title.  If you weren’t, no matter, it’s not really relevant anyway, it just reminded me of what I want to talk about and that’s Intellectual Property.

I’ve started the New Year with a dilemma and I want to let some ideas flow onto this virtual paper as a way of me exploring how I really feel about this and (maybe) providing you readers with some light entertainment.

The giving away of what appears to be ones intellectual property for free (or very cheaply) as a business model.

You may be wondering how that can be a business model when there is no business to be had when everything is free?  Well I’m guessing it has something to do with the cult of celebrity and the hope that their rising profile and follower count will eventually lead to a big pay-day somehow and somewhere.

Anyway…

I feel a bit weird about it all to be honest. It’s not that I’m adverse to sharing or not monetizing the knowledge that I personally have.  I’ve been writing this blog for free for long enough now for that (hopefully) to be apparent and while, yes, the blog does serve as a bit of advertising for my consulting,  it’s actually a fact that the bulk of my paid customer base over the last ten years haven’t found me through my blog at all, it’s been more of a word of mouth, industry type of thing which is nice but it does somewhat prove that I could have just kept my mis-spelt words and wacky intellect to myself and used my time to walk more or talk to my dogs. I digress…

So the weirdness I feel is centred on what is turning out to be the theme of my life really, my one-woman quest to try to encourage people to place more value on their resources than they currently do.  For me this spans all things from environmental resources such as palm oil to personal resources such as your time and energy. Somewhere in between all of that is the huge amount of value that I place on the scientific method, slow and deep thinking and the art of paying attention.

To sum up the weirdness I feel about all of this giving away of everything is that for me it kind of flies in the face of all that I value, not because of the act of giving, I think we should give more, I truly do (is she just contradicting herself a bit here???), more that I fear we are dumbing everything down and commoditising what should be a really beautiful learning process and that this has become a particularly popular thing to do thanks to the addictive aspect of social media that is ‘the cult of celebrity’ and ‘promise of easy money’.

But then I ponder on again, maybe I’ve missed something here. Maybe these people don’t have the same relationship with knowledge that I do?  It’s highly possible that is the case…

It is true that not all Intellectual Property is created equally.  I might go into the lab and find that this goes with that and creates something nice and the whole process have taken me next to no time, as a bit of creative fun. I could then quite happily share that with my online friends, as a comment in a group of specialists or on my Instagram feed with a nice picture.  My sharing is about the here and now, what you see is what you get and the rest is up to you.

But it doesn’t work like that for me.

Sure I go into the lab for five minutes and throw some things together and sometimes they work out great but my five minutes has been underpinned by foundations that span 21 years of trial and error, that have chemistry and application knowledge, that intimately know the supply chain and the problems that can come up, that understand scalability and process flow, that have an intricate knowledge of costing, margins and return-on-investment and not just for one brand, for many.  I understand the legal framework albeit not as thoroughly as a regulatory specialist but I understand it nonetheless,  then there’s stability, micro testing, packaging compatibility, consumer behaviour, marketing and skin feel.   So my five minutes in the lab was supported and made fruitful thanks to the 2.6 million minutes that sat behind it,  at least half of those totally self-funded via my own business.

It’s not that I think that nobody else has that kind of understanding, more that I don’t think the way that business is being run these days as a social media popularity or get-rich-and-famous-quickly model is helping people to reflect on the true value of what they have or what they are asking and rank it accordingly.  Social media doesn’t necessarily give you more points for being better qualified or more experienced and it’s hard for people to tell that stuff,  one good layout of pictures or share of ‘behind the scenes’ action looks as convincing as the next to the layperson, that’s what’s led to brands that share pictures of their founders mixing what we are led to believe are cosmetics in their food kitchen, in food bowls with hair flowing and everyone breathing into everything.  Not exactly representative of what goes on in a real lab environment but we like it so it ‘wins’.

So back to this and I’m left with the realisation that the reason I’m a bit weirded out by all this is because, yet again, I’m living in a completely different I.P world to many of the other people I float around with on social media and while that’s OK, it’s going to sometimes jar a little.

My final thought brings me back to the point of it all, the human desire to share and exchange ideas and make connections.  I now understand, I think, that there are tiers of I.P  supported by different layers of value that is invisible/ unfathomable to the bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed but that to participate in this dance I have to find a way to play and I will play.   In order for me to play I have to keep my mission, my motivation, at the front of my mind so that the exercise is all worth it.   So with that I confirm that the point of it all for me is to participate in the pursuit of knowledge and the growth of understanding,  not in what to think but in how to think.

And that’s why I sometimes won’t give you a formula or specific ‘do this or that’ advise but I will hand you a key to unlock that door for yourself.  It’s not my problem if you don’t recognise what a key is but you know what, I’d probably try to help you learn of the keys value too as that’s just what I do whenever possible.

And with that I’m going to go off and look at how I can better orient my social media chanels to allign with that  realisation 🙂

Amanda