A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called “Idea Catching” about the fallacy in business and life that ideas are proprietary. If you have a good one, you can bet it’s been had by others, too. While this reality is sometimes hard to accept for businesses like advertising and consulting that traffic in ideas, it’s already changing the way social entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and others with a more collectivist mentality operate.

There is a shift happening. The old paradigm was about racing out to the patent office or the intellectual property attorney to establish domain over a fresh idea in order to reap glory and profits for oneself. The new paradigm is about strengthening and enhancing our ability to act on big ideas by uniting behind them. Mainly because we have to if we’re going to solve the enormous problems we face collectively.

Just yesterday a friend directed me to a new project launched this week by internet artist and designer, Jonathan Harris (http://number27.org), called The Sputnik Observatory: ( http://sptnk.org).

In an email announcement, Jonathan describes the site as “the result of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology, covering a wide range of topics.”

He goes on to describe the premise of the Sputnik project:

“The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.

Conducted over more than ten years and previously unavailable to the public, the interviews within the site chronicle some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades. The site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness.”

Crowdsourcing, social media, and the web generally have been pushing us in this direction, but there is still a fundamental sense of ownership that accompanies the “A ha!” moment. It may take us a while to reroute the neurons from the ego through a more generous path to altruism, but it will happen and must happen as we push up against the greatest of all challenges to creative solutions: TIME. The clock is ticking, people.