Collaborating does not mean losing individuality. As Howkins (2010: 66) assures,
“collaboration doesn’t obviate individual talent or ignore the light bulb’ moment”.
Collaboration also means a personal bonanza.
4. Competition: we now that today’s world is in a battle for limited natural resources.
As Darwin (1859) indicates in his book On the Origin of Species, there is competition,
struggles, enemies, battles and even wars (Howkins 2010: 66); everyone who can is
engaged in a fight: people, companies and even countries.
Howkins (2010: 67) wants to point out that “ecology’s understanding of competition
is more subtle and more interesting”. As he explains, in a creative ecology “two
organisms might compete for the same resource but the competition might be peaceful
and might occur without the participants knowing they are competitors, which takes the
edge off any real sense of conflict” (Howkins 2010: 67).
Parrish (2007) is an upholder of a different attitude to competition suggested by
Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1996) as he prefers the word “co-opetiton”. Parrish (2007:
48) claims the “co-opetition to be the result of bringing together competition and cooperation
to form a new partnership”. This kind of “co-opetition” is possible
when specialties, strengths and other characteristics of several competing objects are
not exactly the same – they are different in their competitive positioning. No-one fails
for others to succeed and each gets more than it had before (Parrish 2007: 48).
In creative ecology, Howkins (2010: 67) distinguishes two levels of competition: the
internal and the external. An individual experiences internal competition when striving
to launch the best idea of all possible ones; the idea needs to meet internal standards of
aesthetics and style that are particular to that individual. Howkins (2010: 67) suggests
this is time “to find people collaborating at this stage in order to enable them to compete
with their own notion”. External requirements for our idea are novelty, meaning and
utility; an idea has to fight for itself in the marketplace, i.e. “creative freedom needs
markets if it is to develop” (Howkins 2010: 68).