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.
Great historical perspective on collaborative innovation! I had no idea the government used a open collaboration model in the late 1950's to quickly ramp up innovation for defense reasons. It makes sense for the same reason people are using Open Innovation today because you can pool resources of many talented people and innovate even faster. During the cold war era the Advanced Research Projects Agency must have been a very exciting and important project to collaborate on.
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