The first keynote presentation at this week’s Cutter Summit conference is on the emerging broadband explosion. After summarizing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat message that more and more knowledge work is being “chunked, routinized, digitized, and automated” — and then moved offshore to countries with much lower labor costs than North America and Western Europe — Harvard Business School professor Stephen Bradley concludes that “we need even better innovation capabilities, because it’s the best (only?) way to create value as we move into the future.” He then asks, “How can broadband improve our abilities to innovate?”

Bradley has several answers to this question, which he and HBS professor Robert Austin have discussed in a new book called (duh!) The Broadband Explosion. Much of it focused on some familiar predictions about broadband distribution of movies, music, and other forms of entertainment. But I was intrigued by his emphasis on the use of broadband technology to support and facilitate collaboration among scientists, researchers, and workers of all kind — especially workers who are distributed in offices and laboratories around the world. He provides some interesting examples: the Space Physics and Aeronomy Collaboratory (SPARC) at the University of Michigan; the Neptune Ocean Observatory; and the California Orthopedic Research Network. Interestingly, though, he doesn’t mention the notion of grass-roots, ad hoc, extemporaneous collaborations that pop into existence in response to natural disasters, political crises, and other dramatic events. Grass-roots collaboration takes place on the Internet today, of course, but it’s almost entirely low-bandwidth stuff: discussion forums, bulletin boards, Wikipedias, and various other text-only mechanisms.

Bradley describes collaboration in a broadband world as “iterative innovation.” More interestingly, he refers to it as “reliable innovation,” by which he means the “reliable generation of valuable inconsistences” — which can lead to breakthroughs. And he notes that we’ll need several other technologies, in addition to broadband, to make all of this work: non-PC and PC-integrated devices; commodity peripheral devices; real-time peer-to-peer software platforms; rich client runtime platforms that combine; and parallel fermentation of collaboration technologies. All of this will support real-time collaboration, which Bradley feels will bring about fundamental changes in individual/organizational habits.

At this point, the conference audience has begun interrupting, asking questions, and offering some interesting insights on the combination of collaboration and competition. One of the conference attendees has recommended a book by Raymond Miles, entitled Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Communities Of Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation To Create Economic Wealth. I haven’t seen the book, but it sounds interesting; I think I’ll order a copy from Amazon right now (excuse me for a moment while I open another tabbed window in my web browser to visit the Amazon site), so that it will be waiting for me when I get back to New York in a couple days…

The second part of Bradley’s presentation concerns the transformation of existing industries because of the broadband revolution. His examples include trends in Internet shopping, Internet-based real-estate (which will probably disintermediate real estate agents, just like the travel agents whose industry vanished when we all started buying our plane tickets on Travelocity a few years ago). Bradley also has some interesting statistics, trends, and observations about wireless broadband data and entertainment, ranging from music to movies. One interesting trend involves the well-known shift away from CD’s and other traditional forms of recorded music to the downloadable form of music that we get from either Napster or iTunes. It turns out that the downloads of albums are close to zero, while the downloads of single songs (at 99 cents, if you do it legally on iTunes) are growing exponentially.

Another interesting observation from Bradley is that, because of ubiquitous broadband technology, piracy is going to explode — to the great detriment of the traditional Hollywood industry. But he missed an observation that I heard at some other conference during the past year: the reason it’s such a disaster for Hollywood is because their business model is predicated on spending anywhere from $20 million to $100 million to make a movie. If you spend that much money creating your product, obviously you’re going to do anything you can to prevent it from being stolen. But what if your business model made it possible to create movies for, say, $10,000? In that case, almost anyone with a few bucks in his savings account could make his own movie; and the biggest problem would be exposure and marketing: how on earth can you get the global marketplace to pay attention to your low-cost movie? In that world, of course you want your movie to be “pirated” by every Internet user on earth.

The final “media industry” that Bradley discusses, in terms of being threatened by broadband, is the newspaper industry. He notes that a lot of the big publications are busily hedging their existing businesses by acquiring Internet-based businesses like about.com and slate.com. And I was delighted to see that he emphasized the shift in revenues from classified advertising to craigslist.com; but he missed the interesting observation that most traditional publishers aren’t even familiar with craigslist.