A Matter of Scale

Paul Spinrad’s piece in the Main Street Journal challenges the way we think about scale. 

Spinrad draws an article by Professor Andrews Ayiku, a member of the institute’s “brain trust,” and a recent interview with Alejandro Juárez Crawford on the Plucky Bamboo podcast. He writes: 

“Crawford argues that investors were so captivated by the success of things like Facebook that they now try to make other things scale the way software can. For example, they’re buying out small farms to create global industrialized food systems and taking over local hospitals to standardize their care, even though these consolidations don’t serve people well and they’d pay for something better if it were available.

Crawford argues that in the real world, trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and address them all with one unified system will inevitably fail. The people at corporate headquarters, and the software they deploy, don’t have eyes, ears, minds, hands, and hearts on the ground, so they won’t see the most locally-responsive solutions or potential local efficiencies.

To facilitate grassroots innovation, Crawford co-created RebelBase, a popular web-based platform for collaborative entrepreneurship. RebelBase offers an integrated set of tools and templates that guide users through the different parts of a typical entrepreneurial journey, such as identifying a problem, developing and validating solutions, building a team, and getting funding. It’s for people everywhere to create new businesses, not to create a new business for people everywhere.”