Johnny Lee (of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw fame):
"I have actually put quite a bit of thought toward this topic having recently jumped back and forth between DIY hobby culture, serious academic research, and massively funded commercial product development. I've had the fortune to observe people trying to make new and interesting things at extremely different scales...from $100 budgets to $100,000,000 budgets.
One thing that I find very consistent: good ideas come from anywhere. The biggest factor in predicting where good work will come from is "how much does this person actually care about what they are working on?" In fact, big budgets and a sense of entitlement can actually hinder the emergence of interesting ideas. Having the *expectation* to do really great work can lead people or organizations to develop tunnel vision on "big" ideas, and miss out on smaller ideas that end up having a lot of impact or dismiss seemingly silly approaches that actually end up working."
"Consider Samuel Pierpont Langley vs. the Wright Brothers in pursuit of powered flight. Langley represented the exceptionally well funded professional research organization, and the Wright Brothers were the scrappy passionate pair of DIY'ers. Today, we now know the Wright brothers as the ones who created the first airplane and most have never heard of Langley. Big investment is not a very strong predictor of valuable output. But, an individual's willingness to continue working on the same problem with very little to no pay... is a good predictor."
Brilliant. The largest factor in determining the success of a project isn't the budget (though a budget may be necessary to eliminate a financial barrier to entry in a technological field), but how much the people working on it care about it.
A project lives or dies because someone takes ownership of it, places it on their shoulders, and drives it to successful completion.
You can read more, here:
http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-emergence-of-diy-vs-big.html
(I'm not usually a fan of reposting, but thought that this was too valuable to pass up)
