open innovation
ARI’s Managing Director, Robert Chalmers writes for The Conversation
Concepts like “Open innovation”, “Crowdsourcing”, “Open Access”, “Open Source”, “Open Data” and others are being bandied about. What does it all mean and how do these approaches relate to the “old school” approaches of developing and exploiting intellectual property? Open Innovation is a concept promoted in part by the author and academic Henry Chesbrough. Unsurprisingly, this approach boils down to the need to engage with other people and their perspectives to develop better products or services. Of course, open innovation has been happening since time immemorial. Many companies have embraced open innovation through collaboration with their own consumers, researchers and external partners, including companies like Siemens, Cadbury and Lilly - with their open innovation drug discovery program. Crowdsourcing of ideas and funding is all the rage: from philanthropic purposes, to start-ups, to multinational companies which now routinely use crowdsourcing to gather innovation they can’t generate internally. The rise of crowdsourcing raises a number of understandable concerns. There’s potential for scandal: where a crowdsourced project takes money, fails or doesn’t even use it for the project; or exploitation where those who contribute ideas receive no reward. A plethora of crowd sourcing platforms have emerged with a variety of business models, some for profit and others not. Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com) is a good example
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– hundreds of millions of dollars pledged by millions of people for tens of thousands of projects, just since April 2009.
Open data is newer than any of the “open” movements – essentially open access to data sets rather than just research publications.
Open Access is a crowd-based movement promoting the push toward open access for journal articles. After decades of paying staff to generate journal content and then having to pay again to access that content, universities are reconsidering the best way to disseminate knowledge.
There are many different groups working on this from different angles, including the Open Data Commons (http://opendatacommons. org/) – a sort-of copyright-based Creative Commons for data, and the Open Data Foundation (www.opendatafoundation.org/) – directed at enabling access to consistent metadata to inform public policy and decisionmaking.
Open Source is sometimes seen as the precursor of other “open” movements. Emerging out of the Free Software Movement in the 1980s, open source provides access to the source code of computer software so others can further develop that code. There are many different flavours of open source, with many tricks and traps for those who aren’t aware of the conditions of access. Different licence agreements contain different provisions around rights of use, restrictions on downstream works, warranties, indemnities and other matters. Many benefits have flowed from the use of open-source models of software and hardware development, including the Linux operating system, Arduino electronics, and even key software embodied in nearly every mobile phone. The open-source model has also spilled over into biology and science. For example, Richard Jefferson’s shared his discovery of a key genetic tool – the beta-glucuronidase gene – used in plant genetic engineering. He gave research labs free access to this tool, but charged for its commercial use and then invested the proceeds to further promote open source initiatives.
The promise of innovation and efficiency held out by making use of “Big Data” in the public and private sector will not be fully realised until there is better progress on common standards for open data, as well as a change in culture more open to the benefits that flow from sharing. Proprietary models which are founded on protecting and exploiting intellectual property are often cast in opposition to “open” models. But this apparent opposition is an illusion. Many of the open models are actually built on intellectual property rights – it is just the way in which those rights are used that differs from proprietary models. An open conclusion - Individuals can and do choose how open or closed they wish to be in their work. This does not have to be an ideologically fixed and static choice between polar opposites. Being open – through social networks, in research or business – is the trend, but a blend of different approaches gives us a healthy innovation ecosystem. Abrigded from the original article ‘Explainer: what is the open movement?’ http://theconversation.com/au