The World Wide Web is 20 years old. It is a remarkable innovation that has changed our lives. How did it come about? In this video clip from TED, Tim Berners-Lee, the Englishman who started the whole thing, talks about the origins of the Web and his vision for the future. He invented the use of hyperlinks because he was frustrated about accessing data in different formats. Crucially his boss gave him the ‘play-time’ to experiment on his ideas and to create the basic building blocks of the Web.
He goes on to talk about how we need to moved from linked documents to linked data and explains how ‘data is relationships’.
One of the important lessons we can learn from his story is about the importance of frustration and play. Identify the processes or issues that cause frustration to your people or your customers. Then allocate some play-time for your smartest people to conceive ideal solutions and experiment on how they could be developed. It is unlikely that you will come up with something as revolutionary as the Web but you might just solve that niggling problem with a useful innovation.
Paul Sloane
Tags: berners-lee, data, frustration, Innovation, internet, link, play, web