Open Innovation in Historical Perspective

One way of illustrating the depth of today's Open Innovation Revolution might be to probe historical instances of collaboration between communities, letting the workings of specific projects throw light on just how much Open Innovation currently impacts inter-community work.

While developments in Open Innovation are lately occurring with the modern era's characteristic breakneck speed, it's still possible to point out the roots of many open methodologies. Take, for example, Ronda Hauben's retrospective analysis of collaborations between the military and scientific communities that led to the creation of ARPANET. In her paper "Computer Science and the Role of Government in Creating the Internet: ARPA/IPTO (1962-1986)," Hauben inadvertently reveals that some characteristics of the project (inter-organizational collaboration, elements of crowdsourcing) are analogous to current open paradigms.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency arose in a chain of responses to Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957. Innovation was deemed a top priority in the defense community, and ARPA was created in 1958. From the outset, it was an autonomous organization that utilized the interdisciplinary talents of civilian scientists from various universities and institutions.

The type of crowdsourcing used in, say, the Tor project involves posting one of the project's ongoing development issues to torproject.org. Anyone can attempt to solve the posted problem. While some individuals working on ARPANET were organically incorporated into the network of research collaborators, many important researchers were scouted. For example, J.C.R. Licklider-- whose innovative ideas on "Man-Computer Symbiosis" eventually kick-started ARPANET-- became a part of ARPA through invitation. Crowdsourcing with the help of today's Internet is a natural evolution of this older, less exhaustive method; one method requires an active search for key collaborators, while the other allows those individuals to present themselves. The common link between them is the goal of seeking world-class technical innovators. I would argue that one method (today's crowdsourcing) is simply much easier.

There are plenty of similarities and differences to be noted between the Revolution of today and the collaborative work of decades past. I hope to conduct a few comparisons here, at the blog.

Can Open Innovation regain America's competitive edge?

Join a panel of experts on October 29, 2010 at 9am eastern time to discuss how Open Innovation strategies can help America strengthen her competitive edge. The discussion will be moderated by Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University.

See a the list of panelists and find out more information on how to participate: http://asu.edu/innovationforum/

Deadline to sign up it Oct 22, 2010.

What is Open Innovation?

Open Innovation is a movement that technology groups, consultants, companies, and academic institutions are involved in evolving and defining.

I was introduced to the idea of Open Innovation in an LinkedIn post Stefan Lindegaard responded to back in 2009. While I don't remember specifics about the post I do remember being very curious about the response and further investigated the author. I found out Lindegaard was just about to publish a book; The Open Innovation Revolution. Revolution? Was there something specific to the idea of 'Open' Innovation that was different than just the idea of innovation? I found out YES! Open Innovation was a specific movement that many people were involved with. I was able to read a preview chapter and was immediately on the hunt for more information about companies that were participating in this movement. He listed a few specific companies and so I looked up a General Mills website where anybody was invited to solve company problems and if the solution was what they needed they offered up to $50,000 for the contribution. This idea not only was exciting I wanted to learn more so I could find opportunities to participate and share this exciting idea with other people.

After more than a year of research I realized there are many different groups that are involved with Open Innovation, from public calls for ideas to academic institutions helping connect the right people to the right problem. This idea was not specific to any one field or industry. You can find groups looking for solutions for consumer good to medical researcher looking for people to help with research. When we started this group I was also reminded of all the wonderful open source projects that are around like Mozilla, which is where we get the great free browser FireFox.

The following posts will explore Open Innovation, current opportunities to get involved and share our thoughts on how this affects us in good ways and explore the downsides to this movement.