Open innovation is not a free ride

October 29th, 2010

This post all starts with Cheese. It starts with Thayer Prime mentioning Neals Yard Cheese (: Btw cheese lovers: Neal’s Yard have a rather amazing blue goat’s cheese in stock at the moment. It is *incredible*. #cheese 6:26pm, Oct 28 from twicca). So I have to admit I am a slut for cheese. Then today I am curious so I go check out Thayers blog, and then link onto her delicious page. I catch sight of a link Openness is a lot of work, authored by Jono from Mozilla Labs. And I think what he has to say makes an awful lot of sense.

He makes the point that his waking hours seem overwhelmed with the words open, openness, open innovation, crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding.

I emphasize this because openness has become quite the buzzword over the last decade, and I worry that people are starting to attribute near-magical powers to it. I wonder if books like Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky, or The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki are over-selling the idea. Being in Silicon Valley I hear a lot about startups based on a “crowdsourcing” business model, or new open source projects run by people who assume that just because they open-source their code, they’ll magically get contributors. Lately the phrase “… ANYONE can participate!” seems to be de rigueur in every presentation.

Indeed, and I for one am a champion of a different way of doing things, a more humane way of doing things. But I also know from the projects I am involved with, and some other organisations that I know – open innovation requires hard work. Just because you are open does not mean people automatically will join in – you have to become attractive and understand there are some real and important dynamics to ignite cooperation.

Let’s say I’ve got an idea for a software project and I want to make it open source. So I put up a public code repository on my website, write a page about my patch submission policy, and start an email list for discussion. Great! I’m done now, right? I can declare my project “open” and go back to hacking now?

This project may be “open” by a technical definition, but if you look at the commit log, I’m still the only one working on it or using it. Where’s my windfall of free volunteer effort?

What is the framework, legal, social, how might one design a process that attracts a community of practice to form? Threadless seem to have got it right, as have Local Motors – we also see a great deal of energy expended in Fan Fiction, For example Harry Potter Fan Faction has produced 65,000 individual fan created stories, yet Warners did not understand or comprehend that harnessing and engaging in co-creation and fan fiction could be commercially valuable to them – all they saw was theft. So Fanfiction offers affinity spaces for the passionate to gather vs sending out cease and desist letters. And GrowVC the worlds first Venture Fund, funded by a global community has already $23m in funding, 5000 global members, generated 1000+ members in 8 weeks with its Indian Community Platform and has just launched in China. Jay at Local Motors talks about economies of scope vs, economies of scale, I suggest that velocity is another concept we need to address: ergo, how does an open approach to design, manufacture, etc., deliver at speeds that an industrial approach could not? And of course there are two sides to this story [1] people, what motivates us [2] technology that can aggregate human cooperation. And of course the grandaddy of all this is LEGO that has used a co-creation approach for a very long time as a core part of its business process.

We need to become ” network literate”, literacy is a word both Henry Jenkins (link to media literacies) and Howard Rheingold (video) use – therefore more words at our disposal and the more sense they make they enable use to become more dexterous, like a craftsman (The craftsman and modern society), (The craftsman and the special human need to be engaged). Craftsmen and woman have a wide ranging language to describe their tools and how to apply them, the combine both head and hand – therefore we need to become modern day craftsmen and women, where we can apply common sense with our new found literacy to know; how to act, and, what to do as individuals, companies and organisations.

Sometimes common sense is not always that common

Jono observes,

This should be common sense. Openness is a policy choice, not a replacement for old-fashioned hard work. I happen to think it’s a good policy choice in many cases: An organization that is open to outside ideas and criticism will learn faster about its own mistakes. It can build more trusting relationships with its users, because it doesn’t have to keep secrets. It attracts self-motivated contributors, and it get more diversity of viewpoints. There’s that old mantra about how “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Open-source code can travel farther and do more because there are fewer restrictions on its use. Codebases with an active community can evolve more quickly and not go obsolete so fast. So there are a lot of benefits; but openness is not a free ride.

So when trying to learn from the success of projects like Linux and Wikipedia (and Mozilla, for that matter), don’t stop at “openness”. The questions to ask are: How does a new person discover the project and make their first contribution? How do they discover what work needs to be done? How does the organization make this discovery path easier or harder for people? How does it integrate and organize contributions? How does it set goals? How does it maintain a coherent vision? Under what circumstances does it reject a contribution?

Roland Deiser in his excellent book Designing the Smart Organisation writes,

The imperative to innovate and reinvent oneself in these changing contexts has become ubiquitous, and permanent. The capability to learn is not just nice to have; it has become a key factor for survival – not only for people, but for organisations, industries, and our global society.

and he makes this telling point,

Organisations need to learn to let go of operational control of non-strategic activities and learn to act successfully in networks. Giving up control is a major challenge, one that has little to do with teaching knowledge or skills but with developing the social and political skills to orchestrate a companies stakeholder universe.

The traditional leadership model of command and control works fine within the boundary of each organisation of the network, but hierarchical power does not work between the memners of a network that co-creates. The interplay between the players needs horizontal coordination and adjustment processes, and these follow the logic of leading without formal power.

Indeed as Jono observes: Successful open organizations aren’t just unorganized mobs, as Roland points out. As we de-couple from the 20th Century we are faced with the dilemma of transition, the more we understand how to do that the better.

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