Glyn Moody: The great prize: open innovation

the great prize: open innovation
glyn moody

once in a lifetime?
global society is passing through a major transition
transition from analogue to digital
vinyl LPs to CDs
video tapes to DVDs
books to ebooks
*not* once in a lifetime
once in a *civilisation*

the digital world
the passage from analogue to digital touches most facets of modern life
most evident in the realm of content – music, film, text
brings need to move from approaches based on scarcity to those based on abundance

digital abundance
marginal cost of a digital copy is close to zero
today: €50 memory stick, capacity 32 Gbytes, stores 5,000 songs
tomorrow: €50 memory stick, capacity 32 Tbytes = 32,000 Gbytes, stores 5,000,000 songs
Spotify: 13,799,112 tracks

digital knowledge
day after tomorrow: able to put all recorded knowledge – text, sounds, pictures, video - on a memory stick
everyone with a smartphone can access *all* of it, anywhere
innovation driven not just by knowledge, but by connections
network effects – of knowledge, of knowers

”analogue” innovation
innovation in an analogue (pre-Web) world
centralised
top-down
collaboration hard
not scalable
The Mythical Man-Month (1975) : ”adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
adding knowledge to traditional innovation makes it slower

” digital” innovation
new kind of innovation first appeared in the earliest digital domain: software
its birth and characteristics can be observed in the story of the free operating system, GNU/Linux

what's GNU?
GNU born in 1984 at MIT
GNU is ”GNU's Not Unix” - a recursive acronym
one man's attempt to create a free version of the leading Unix operating system

a change of heart
by 1991, GNU was still unfinished: it lacked a ”kernel” - the heart of the operating system
in March 1991, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds started writing one ”just for fun” – in his Helsinki bedroom
key inflection was August 1991, when he opened up his ”Linux” project using the Internet

open innovation
decentralised
anyone, anywhere, could join in
bottom-up
people fed suggestions, problems and solutions to Linus
collaboration easy
Internet was more affordable
scalable
no formal training required – everything is out in the open

Linus' Law
Eric Raymond: ”given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”
different people approach a problem in different ways
adding more people increases the probability that someone’s approach will matched the problem in such a way that the solution is obvious (”shallow”) to that person

power, economy, reliability
91% of top 500 supercomputers run Linux
1% run Microsoft Windows
Google runs its services on millions of servers running Linux
so does Facebook, Twitter etc.
Android mobile phone system runs on Linux
400,000 handsets activated daily
launched November 2007

open innovation projects
open genomics
Human Genome Project
open access
arXiv, Public Library of Science
open content
Wikipedia
open data
OpenStreetMap

motivating open innovation
personal satisfaction ( aka ”fun”)
peer esteem
altruism
money
but generally work is aligned with one or more of the above as well

crowdsourcing
open problem-solving (2004)
not formal projects
open call for solution
self-selecting group respond
large-scale, loosely-specified, no reward – UK MPs expenses
smaller-scale, tightly-specified, payment by results – DesignCrowd
mixed specification and payment terms – Challenge.gov

inducement prizes (1)
highly-directed, highly-rewarded, high-profile form of problem-based open innovation
Longitude Prize (1714) for simple way to determine ship's longitude
£20,000 - determine longitude within 30 nautical miles (56 km)
worth €40 ,000,000 present-day money
won unexpectedly by clockmaker, John Harrison

Orteig Prize (1919) for flying non-stop New York-Paris ($25,000)
won by Charles Lindbergh 1927
9 teams spent $400,000
instigated US aviation boom:
300% more applications for pilot's licence in 1927; 400% more licensed aircraft in 1927;air passengers went from 5,800 (1926) to 173,400 (1927)
huge media event

Ansari X Prize for building and launching a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometres above the earth's surface, twice within two weeks ($10 million)
26 teams spent more than $100 million trying to win prize
$1.5 billion dollars spent on private spaceflight industry
widespread publicity

more X Prizes
sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, $10,000 per genome ($10 million)
launching, landing, and operating a rover on the lunar surface ($20 million)
improved point-of-care TB diagnostic suitable for the developing world

open inducement prizes (1)
wide open
Scotland's Saltire Prize - £10 million purse to reward wave and tidal energy breakthroughs: ”open to any individual, team or organisation”
16 year-old Canadian won national science contest with drug cocktail for helping cystic fibrosis patients
largest pool of participants

big problems, loose solutions
inspire *and* liberate
need clear end-points, ideally with milestones against which progress can be checked
need maximum freedom for achieving those milestones and the final result

transparent process
participants can gain peer esteem and assume leadership roles
new communities can be created around problems
feedback from even wider circle of interested parties can be offered
provides broad educational benefits

clear social benefit
taps into altruism
motivates people to participate
easier to create sustained media interest
public is more engaged with prize and participants

sharing
encourage contestants to share results among themselves, through sub-prizes based on contributions, ”open source dividend” etc.
stops re-invention of the wheel
accelerates open innovation
adds to knowledge abundance
drives further open innovation
creates virtuous circle

the great prize: open innovation
[email_address] @glynmoody on identi.ca/Twitter opendotdotdot.blogspot.com

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Glyn Moody: The great prize: open innovation

by glynmoody on Jun 16, 2011

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