Innovation vs Optimisation

Apologies for the delay in posting... James at Banker Vision has a discussion on Innovation vs Optimisation that I think has echoes outside of the banking industry, in particular with the Recorded Music Industry. For a long time, the music industry has operated with a view to "doing what they do better". So contracts get bigger because they accomodate scenarios that didn't exist at the time of first drafting, and the power accumulates in the hands of a few as success breeds success. All this engrains the culture of optimisation. The divergence between the tools available and the tools the major labels use has become so vast that every man and his dog is trying to discover the best ways of using the tools, and the major label system is in tatters. And yet no clear winner, no clearly successful use of all the tools neglected by the majors has become apparent. I'd say that the tools for innovation for the music industry exist, but nobody has actually been able to put them all together successfully yet. So the major label system is not necessarily dead yet.

[apologies to the American readers: I'm in New Zealand and we use British English spelling: optimisation vs optimization]