Innovation is so disruptive and straight-from-the-garage now that retaining the traditionality of entrepreneurship is becoming difficult. If I wish to venture into the M domain, I really need to be a junkie or a geek. On the other hand, industry-wide ventures which address certain core problems in a specific domain (e.g information security) still need that ‘adoption curve’.

Duhh!

Think about it. To invoke my Heidegerrian language again, we only really begin to appreciate our experiences of being-in-the-world once we have progressed beyond the age of 40. I would argue that this is the case because of all that biological evidence that addresses how past experiences bias present perceptions; and, in the way we tend to live today, 40 is about the age by which we have accumulated an experience base with a fair amount of both breadth and depth. As you point out, however, it is also the age at which we leave the “fun of the trenches” and succumb to the more deadening aspects of the workplace.

I have been staring at my screen for the last five minutes agonizing over whether or not I want to invoke the noun “wisdom.” I really want to avoid it because of the ways in which the noun-games that have been brought on by knowledge management frenzy have robbed most of our common-sense vocabulary of all of its meaning. Let me, instead, continue with the vocabulary I was using in the last paragraph and suggest that, for all the claptrap that grew up along with knowledge management faddism, we still do not really comprehend the nature of that experience base at the level of either the individual or any of the communities in which that individual is embedded; and, since we understand it so poorly, we are equally inadequate in our efforts to leverage it, to engage the past as a valuable resource when confronting the issues of the present.

Much as these paragraphs may have sounded like a digression, they really are not. It may well be that while databases and “knowledge bases” may have failed us in our attempt to achieve a better understanding of personal experiences, the right mix of macroanalysis and microanalysis of behavior in a rich social environment like Facebook may yield more viable results, both in enhancing our understanding and enablish those experiences to be leveraged in present behavior. Perhaps I am being too optimistic about how much of the human condition we can ultimately grasp, but I think the trail your a beginning to blaze deserves serious attention!