The Power of Open Source Innovation

HBS Working Knowledge recently featured an interesting post entitled, Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation. In it Karim Lakhani talks about some of his more recent research. Here's what he has to say:

Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines. People have talked about that a lot and I think we're providing some systematic evidence now with this study. Another example is that a pharmaceutical company got unusual toxicology results for an ongoing drug study. The best toxicologists within the firm had a look at the results and couldn't understand them. Their external academic consultants, also toxicologists, also failed to interpret the results. Then they finally posted it onto InnoCentive. A protein crystallographer looked at the problem and basically gave an off-the-shelf solution. The pharmaceutical company had never viewed the problem as a crystallography problem; they thought it was a toxicology problem. Again, this opened up a whole new domain for the firm to pursue in terms of future studies as to how to think about the types of problems they face.

We see this in many different places. The insight is that what you want to do is open up your problem to other people—not just to serendipity, but in some systematic way.

What we don't know is whether some firms may be large enough by themselves to already have the requisite variety and heterogeneity inside the firm. Could they first start by broadcasting problems inside?

There are always issues around managerial incentives, silos, and so forth, but certainly by the way we see open source communities and InnoCentive work, in fact, by broadcasting a problem you can actually attract a lot of people. And what's also important to note is that the problem solving being done is not "We'll spend five years coming up with a solution." Most people take knowledge and information from their back pockets and transfer it to the problem at hand. In our study the average time spent by successful solvers was two weeks, so that's fairly little in the scheme of things.

And why did scientists participate:

We've found that the population was divided into two sets of folks: those motivated by money who wanted to win the challenge, and those who enjoyed the problem-solving experience in itself. They found it to be stimulating and fun, and both of those were strong indicators. Enjoyment and the challenge of learning was the strongest correlate of being a successful solver. But money was also important and it was a significant correlate.

Call it what you will, open source, co-creation, collaboration, creating the future together is a powerful path to be more innovative. It's good to see more academic research proving the point.

Comments

[GrahamHill]

John

It has long been known that creativity occurs most in the so-called "complexity zone": the zone between simplicity where everything is the same and chaos where too much feedback makes pattern recognition difficult.

ALL organisations have the capability to be creative (read: innovative). But doing so requires management to be comfortable with letting creative solutions emergence from the interactions of many different individuals. "Letting go", as P&G's CEO AG Laffley recently urged is not always that easy for management.

The subject is comprehensively tackled in Ralph Stacey's 1996 book "Complexity and Creativity in Organizations".

Graham Hill