With this column, we launch a new Tech Talk series. It will essentially focus on innovation, innovators, innovation relationships, and how you can move from being a creative outlier to an active innovator. The column will be part of Business Monday on The Berkshire Edge because the largest difference between a creator and an innovator is having a business model and innovation relationships.
We will be discussing how current business and technology converge and modulate each other and, because we are living here in the Berkshires in a unique cultural mecca, what this has to do with culture and the arts.
Editor’s note: Because our author is also a musical composer (Juilliard-trained), he has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. See notes about the composition at the end of the column.
If you have ever wanted to start a new project—whether it be founding a company, writing a book, recording an album, or inventing a new product or process—now is the time to do it. The barriers to entry are the lowest they have ever been in history. The democratization of technology has swept many gatekeepers out of the way.
Barriers come in many shapes and sizes and differ depending on markets you might want to enter. For the most part they have to do with access and cost. Access to money, equipment, decision makers, permission givers and relevant contacts. Dramatically shrinking costs of technology, manufacturing, production, international labor (due to the flattening of the world) and communication combined with the tremendous economies of scale enabled by rapid adoption have changed how much it costs to enter a market.
It is also a lot easier to find the people you want to speak with, now that social media and meet-up technology have transcended physical proximity as a requirement to bring together people with shared interests and goals. Ideational proximity is steadily becoming more powerful than geographic proximity.
The population of writers and musicians seems to have exploded because they no longer must have an agent to create a brand. Precise numbers are hard to come by because of disagreements between sources, but there is no question that every year, the number of books published and songs released increases. Sources indicate that these were each estimated at 4 million titles in 2023.
These days, a musician can set up a basic recording studio at home for under $1000, instead of paying $500 or more per day to hire one. An author can prototype a book in under a week and produce a box of 100 copies for under $1,000. Using legal software that is available online, you can file the paperwork yourself to incorporate a new business in most states. I have personally done this in New York, California, and Massachusetts in less than a day for under $100. You can get a business license and file a DBA even faster and for less. You can even write your own patent application and file it with the patent office for $200.
Most of this is due to the democratization of technology, which Wikipedia defines as “the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people.” During my life, the cost of computing has dropped from millions of dollars to tens of dollars, and this has seeped into almost every aspect of the creative process.
Invention, too, is on the rise. In the 2023 fiscal year, a total number of 346,152 patents were granted at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This is a huge increase from the fiscal year of 2000 when 182,218 patents were issued. (statista.com), and data from the US Census Bureau shows that over 5 million new businesses were started in 2021 and again in 2022. This is compared to 2015 and 2016 when there were slightly fewer than 3 million companies starting each year. If you want to start a business today there are so many new cost-effective services available. I know many people in Silicon Valley who for years have been leveraged by teams of people they have never met in person.
The tools we now have access to are unbelievably powerful, in part due to Moore’s Law, which, by the way, is not a law of physics or engineering but mostly psychological law which began as an observation made by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) roughly doubles every two years. This observation became a projection, causing the semiconductor industry to continue to find ways to achieve this.
At this moment, the smartphone is the single most important piece of technology the average person owns. First announced in 1992 by IBM, the Simon Personal Communicator (SPC), “the “World’s First Smartphone,” was released for purchase in 1994. The smartphone is perhaps the most ubiquitous example of the democratization of technology that has dramatically changed all of our lives. It’s also our on-ramp to seriously lowering barriers to entry to do just about anything. You have all heard the phrase, “There is an app for that.” At present, there are well over 5 million apps between the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. There are even apps that help you design and develop apps.
There has never been a time in human history when ordinary individuals were so leveraged. If you have ever had an idea about some new direction to embark upon, now is the time to try it. Humans are excellent at adapting. For better or worse, if we were not terrific innovators, we would have perished as prey instead of becoming predators. We are all hard-wired for creativity and innovation. Although many of us forget this, it is our birthright, and at this very moment, we have access to more tools, knowledge, and know-how than ever before.
Therefore, there is no point in waiting for there to be a better time to try to make something happen. If you want to create meaning in your life by starting a new project, now is the time. There will always be external variables beyond your control, but the number of things under your control today is mind-boggling.
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Author/composer’s notes on Bratat24: This piece is 2 minutes and 35 seconds long, and there are several embedded innovation stories within it. The piece is a string bass and piano duo, where the pizzicato bass delivers the initial theme, and the piano joins in at the 41-second mark.
Here are three unusual things about it:
1) It is in two keys at the same time blended into a super key. The bass begins playing in the key of D and when the piano comes in in the key of D, the bass switches to the key of C. On the second phrase, they then switch, and the bass is now in the key of D with the bass in the key of C. In the third phrase, the bass is in the key of Eb, and the piano is in the key of Ab.
2) It is a short conversation between the two instruments, which was originally composed just for the piano, which is how it is usually performed as a solo piano piece.
3) I actually played both parts at the same time, synthesizing the upright bass line with my left hand on a keyboard driving a Macintosh with many gigabytes of bass waveforms stored in memory. Simultaneously, I was playing the piano part with my right hand, also driving a Macintosh, which was solving simultaneous equations of how a piano should sound in real-time.
Tech/Culture Background
The ability to use a Mac laptop to create and perform this kind of composition only became possible in 2020 when Apple introduced the M1 chip in the MacBook Air. There has never been a laptop powerful enough to do this previously, so an innovation story is built into this piece. I did not want to be so much of a nerd to include it in the column, but in terms of lowering the overhead for a composer, it is actually a somewhat technically amazing feat. When I performed this live in real-time, musicians were amazed that it was even possible. When I sent various recordings highlighting the string bass sound to my composition professor at Julliard, he asked where I found the virtuoso string bass player. When I tried to encourage other musicians to improvise, they could not figure out what key to play because it is always in two keys at the same time and changes three times.
So, this under-three-minute piece is actually an extreme example of how the democratization of technology provides composers and musicians with new capabilities. Additionally, the MIDI keyboard used to play this was powered by the USB-C port of the MacBook Air using its internal battery. This also blows the minds of musicians, few of whom have ever seen this happen before.
Howard Lieberman is a local musician, writer, and lapsed tech guy who moved full-time to the Berkshires ten years ago. An entrepreneur, teacher, and speaker, he previously worked in sound at Bose and Apple, studied acoustics at MIT, and, most recently, composition at Juilliard. For more information, go to https://HowardL.com
