Over at Bubbleconomics, I wrote recently about the effect of speculative bubbles on innovation — see “Speculative Bubbles: Good for Innovation?”

For a long time, I’ve thought that the so-called “Internet Bubble” from the 1990s was actually a good thing in many ways in that it sparked technology and business-model innovation and trained a generation in a new way of thinking about business and communication. Networking pioneer Bob Metcalfe agrees with me, as he says in a 2011 presentation:

We saw from the many Internet Era bubbles that investment, speculation, inflation, competition, and collapse are tools of innovators against the status quo. Bubbles accelerate technological innovation.

AB — 6 June 2011