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Category: Open Innovation
What the iPad is good for
I have in recent months, with some surprise, seen how the drone armies of the Steve Jobs Cult of Mac have hyped a 15 year old concept into sainthood. From the moment the technical specifications of the iPad became known, it was clear to me that I would not be buying. The iPad is an iPhone + + and that is unfortunately the level of control that Apple will take over all aspects of the use of it. Apple determines which applications you can run, which media sources are acceptable and in what formats those media sources are stored. The iPad is comparable with the AOL Internet experience of over 12 years ago. A walled garden where customers are ‘protected’ from the chaotic freedom that is the open Internet and are made to pay for the privilege.
Critics of the iPad have in recent months rightly explained in detail how the iPad is in many respects a step backwards compared to the rich read/write Internet. Steve’s tablet is primarily a media consumption device, much like a DVD player. You read, watch and listen to something that someone else has created for you and are passive, like a TV couch-potato (TV, you know, from the past …). Determining what things you are viewing is also done by Apple. Having people simply choose their own content and using formats of their choice is obviously not the way things are done on the iPad. The Apple Politburo also chooses what "dirty" words you can and cannot read on the e-book reader.
Like the AppleTV, the device is a direct pipeline to the iTunes and App store. For Apple is it a direct pipeline to your credit card. For the AppleTV there is now a good alternative: XBMC gives the choice over media source and format selection back to the owner of the hardware. Probably there will be something like this for the iPad, a jailbreak or something, so .mkv files can be played and fans can install their own apps without first having to ask permission from Steve.
There is another way. On the Archos Internet tablet, the possibility of installing a completely different OS is even explicitly allowed. If I have a ‘third’ device (in addition to laptop and phone) I want to buy that kind of freedom and I’m willing to pay for it. Buying an iPad in its current form is not for me. Perhaps the device will be more open in the future and then I will reconsider, but not now.
In spite of all this I’m glad that Apple makes these things and hypes them. Apple forces other suppliers of these products to innovate where otherwise they would not, at least for a while. There are now more than ten other parties involved in the release of tablet-like devices and existing devices suddenly get extra attention and software upgrades. More importantly, Apple sets a bar for high usability. This gives the open source community something to strive for. Usability is traditionally not the strongest aspect of open source software. Security, stability and portability were always the focus. For the Linux desktop, Windows is no longer the benchmark, as this has been largely achieved (including CPU-hungry eye-candy with bouncy windows). MacOSX is the standard being pursued (and imitated) by the Ubuntu team and others and that is fine. As Steve himself once quoted Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal", and he would know.
IPod MP3 players were poorly used and uninteresting for the majority of people. The iPhone has motivated Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Google to develop great new phones. So although I will never buy another iPod/Phone/Pad, I enjoy its effect indirectly because of the new concepts that these products have made mainstream. In the same vein I am now, after two MacBook Pros, again enjoying a Thinkpad (X301, Lenovo’s answer to the MacBook Air) with Ubuntu. Thanks Apple!
A 5-7 "tablet with 32Gig fixed memory and an open architecture sounds very nice to me, stick some HSDPA capability on it and I am happy to shell out 600 euros or so.
Open innovation; sharing succes stories
With the bad weather this weekend, I had some time to catch up with my reading. A backlog had built up during the recent beautiful beach weather and the children’s school holidays.
A piece in the newspaper Financieele Dagblad offered a recognizable take on Open Innovation. The headline was: "Treasure of untapped knowledge". It referred inter alia to the recently published benchmark research by Professor Ard-Pieter de Man, Professor of Innovation and Alliances at the VU. Atos Consulting, along with several others such as the TU Eindhoven, presented the results of a benchmark study on the state of open innovation in 90 companies, of which 70% were Dutch.
The data set used in the research shows that open innovation increases a firm’s sales, as well as improving the success rate of new product/service launches. With our experience, this is one conclusion that Gendo can only endorse. The research also shows that most companies face four challenges in the implementation of open innovation:
- The mindset challenge: how does open innovation win the hearts and minds of the employees?
- The ‘intellectual property’ challenge: how can you earn money with intellectual property that is not directly commercially exploited within the company?
- The tools challenge: how do you make best use of tools (including ICT) to support open innovation?
- The ‘management’ challenge: how do you ensure that the appropriate management processes support company employees in their work around open innovation?
Although I recognize these challenges, I do not believe these are "showstoppers" with regard tot the introduction of open innovation to any organization. The article in FD also recognizes this and identifies a number of open innovation success stories, such as Procter & Gamble, Philip and DSM.
The whole point of these success stories comes from both the application of open innovation mechanisms to acquire knowledge from outside the organization (outside-in) as well as mechanisms for the commercialization of unused knowledge within the organization (inside-out).
As the success stories of others are often the best way finally to convince doubters to work towards Open Innovation, I quote below one of Gendo’s favourite examples, namely the ‘outside-in’ case of Rob McKewan of Gold Corp Inc. Adapted from Charles Leadbeater’s bestseller "We Think" (a must-read for anyone who wants to read more about ‘innovation through collaboration’), his story is as follows:
Rob McKewan is a legend among the proponents of open source business models. The former chairman and CEO of Goldcorp Inc, a Canadian mining company, was so frustrated by the inability of his geologists to locate significant gold reserves at its mine in Red Lake, Ontario, he decided to release on the internet all the company’s proprietary information – 50 years’ worth of investigations, geological maps and reports – to see if the global community of geologists could find gold.
The lure, beyond the intellectual challenge, was a prize of $ 500,000. McKewan released the recommendations of his own team on possible drilling locations for gold so he could evaluate them. He also wanted to see whether outsiders would come up with ideas that had eluded his researchers. The challenge attracted 1400 participants, many of whom were geologists, but also physicists, mathematicians, and complex systems specialists – people with skills not available to Goldcorp. Ultimately, 140 of them actually made a contribution and half of the 28 winners discovered drilling locations unknown to the Goldcorp insiders. Red Lake, formerly a laggard within the industry, turned out to be one of the richest gold mines in the world, with 6.6 million ounces of proven reserves.
This example is just one of many success stories out there about open innovation and open business models. It is vital these stories are shared as widely as possible so that the protagonists become better known and more experimental companies can enjoy the rewards that open innovation can bring to them.
3D Opensource printer
Twenty years ago my economics teacher told us ‘Economics is the science of human choice under conditions of scarcity’. This definition always stuck in my mind because economists seem to invest all their energy in vain attempts to model the choice bit and assume the scarcity bit is a given. Material scarcity may seem a given (like the speeds of light or the fact that a peanut butter sandwich always drops on the floor with the wrong side down) because until now it has always been there. It used to be that hand axes were in short supply and now there’s a permanent shortage of the latest generation of mobile phones. Making stuff takes effort and this effort has to be compensated by either a goat or digits in the memory of a bank computer.
But what if we were to take on the scarcity problem, instead of spending endless TV-news business sections discussing the behavioural consequences that are caused by it. Would that not be a much better use of our time? On the Internet nowadays scarcity for most people is not a problem, too much of everything is more of an issue. Selection and filtering of available information, news and media is the challenge, not its production, reproduction or dissemination.
The cost of information reproduction through the Internet may not be zero, they are low enough to be almost impossible to measure. A 250 euro laptop and a 10 euro-a-month Internet subscription gives access to more information, knowledge, media and communication than most of us can handle. And thanks to the vision of Richard Stallman we have all the software we need to make this Interweb thing run for free for ever. Just as important is the fact that together we can adapt this software to do new things that were unfathomable even a decade ago. This open way of working may make it hard for someone to become a billionaire but for our society as a whole it is clearly positive.
The Physical world seemed to be far away from such wealth and ideals. Stacking atoms on top of each other in specific orders and schlepping them around the planet takes effort and energy and thus costs money. A new type of 3D printer developed by a global team of engineers with a opensource mindset is a machine that makes three dimensional physical objects from liquid plastics (metals are coming soon) and data. Such devices have been around in experimental form for over a decade but they were always expensive and bulky. The difference with this Fabbers (or 3D printer or rapid prototyping machine) is that it can make all of its own parts and its designs are freely available for anyone to take, use, modify and re-distribute for anyone. It’s free, self-replicating ‘things’ printer and for the price of a plane-ticket from the UK to Australia you can have one too. Then start making copies for friends and neighbours. Think of it as an Ubuntu Linux installation CD that makes a working computer out of dead hardware and this working computer can then make more install CDs (or distribute the install images online as a server).
On their wiki all information can be found to get one at home and start supplying your community with low/no-cost goods, including more printers and upgrades to those printers. It is the designers intention that this will become a true, global, opensource project were new development of functionalities will be driven by the wishes of its user community. Here’s a video were the inventors explain it bit more themselves. For now 3D printers print mostly simple plastic objects. No silk underwear or banana’s yet. So if you think Star Trek replicator you might be a tad disappointed. But making an experimental tool into something everybody can use every day is a task the opensource community has a good track record on. After solving informational scarcity we will now get busy on material scarcity. As an economist I’d start specializing in ‘abundance economies‘.