Are all of the best and brightest research and development people employed at your organization? Could there be excellent people elsewhere? Organizations across the country have been asking those questions in recent years and have begun to look outside their hallowed walls for solutions. Proctor and Gamble, the innovative consumer goods company in Cincinnati, stated recently that 50% of their new products will come from external sources.
Consider this story from Wikinomics, by Dan Tapscott. In the 1990s, a gold mining company in Canada had fallen on bad times. Its CEO took a sabbatical and spent part of it at MIT where he heard about Linux, the open source software operating system. He wondered whether open sourcing might work in mining, traditionally a very secretive industry. He decided to try. He had all of the company’s research data put on the Internet and offered prizes for people who could find gold. Over 1000 people took part in the contest: miners, graduate students, mathematicians, and former soldiers. Some found gold, the company became very successful, and over $500,000 in prize money was awarded. Open sourcing clearly worked for them.
Open sourcing makes sense in our times. Once upon a time, information was closely held; it was a source of a power base. Back into the Middle Ages, monks were the teachers because they were the only literate ones—they held a monopoly on written information. In our time, however, information is a free commodity, freely distributed on the web. Obscure information sources, once buried in libraries, are now fairly easily accessed. People across the globe can access the same information and create together. The internet started this process; online communities like Facebook and MySpace, as well as co-creation software, continue to give this process wings. Here is another way of looking at it: manufacturing of complex products, like computers and cars, is distributed across many countries and many companies. Why shouldn’t co-creation also be distributed?
Wikipedia, the online, open source encyclopedia, is the model for this type of co-creation. Thousands of contributors have added articles for this website, which has eclipsed Encyclopedia Britan-nica as an information source for young and old people. Because of the democracy of sourcing, errors do occur, but they are changed when detected. Because of some attempts at sabotage, Wikipedia has added editing controls. But the result is irrefutable; open sourcing can create excellent innovations.
A McKinsey report on open sourcing tells another story about highly technical open sourcing:
A global team of more than 2000 scientists, for example, participated in the design of the Atlas particle detector, a complex scientific instrument that will be used to detect and measure subatomic particles in high-energy physics. The effort was disaggregated into many different components and distributed across 165 working groups, which used Internet-based tools to help coordinate the work. (p. 3-4)
That is a complex project. The McKinsey report also tells stories of drug development, auto design, and software creation—all situations where open sourcing has created what arguably no one organization could create. Open sourcing may well be the most effective innovation tool in the years ahead.