Open Innovation Revisited

I've been spending a fair bit of time considering the ramifications of the Open Innovation model lately.  Henry Chesbrough's 2003 book of the same name hinted at what changes would be required to move from an isolationist, walled garden model of innovation and ideation to an open, best-of-breed successor.  The executive summary of his book combined with my stochastic wanderings is essentially:

In the Industrial age, competitive advantage came from the physical possessions of an organization, and their own explicit now-how in best utilizing those possessions.  In the Knowledge age, the rate of change is too rapid a single company, and change and innovation are happening everywhere in the world.  The industrial age walled-garden paradigm of corporate labs and research will be quickly outpaced by organizations who can leverage the best thinkers and innovation from around academia and industry to their competitive advantage by out-executing the garden-dwellers.

This challenges a few current structures and value systems.  First is the idea of 'corporate as sovereign' where an employer owns all thought and labor of an individual while in their employ.  Second is the 'publish or perish' mentality of much of the academic community, where the New York Times non-fiction book market is held up as some sort of yardstick by which professors can determine how their ideas resonate outside of campus.

I keep returning to the concept of the Library from Snowcrash by Stephenson.  For those who have not read the book, the Library was the privatized remnant of the CIA, after the United States Government imploded on itself. Stringers would check-in intelligence and analysis into the Library, and a dynamic market-based pricing scheme would determine the price of those who would want to access that analysis.  There have been smart contracting mechanisms in the past, as well as the resurrection of 'task, not time' systems and EBay-esque market-based auction schemes.  The Library seems to have had a combination of the three of them, which was the ability of people to check in data 'on spec' to a potential customer base, demand-based pricing to determine market rate, as well as a mechanism for more freelance or contract consulting and follow up.

As we move to a more Hollywood-style of work, I wonder how the open innovation model and the Library will turn the traditional R&D function into more of a 'gourmet chef' role of selecting the choicest ingredients from the world-at-large to create the best end product.

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