Clay Shirky on Incumbency

From Principled Innovation:

Earlier this week at the South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) conference in Austin, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky told attendees, “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” The relevance discussion feels like a reflexive institutional response to the loss of control associations have experienced over the last 20 years as their stakeholders have become less dependent on them for access to information, education and connections. We may say we’re searching for fresh answers, but it is not clear to me that we are willing to ask different questions.