The so called ‘Digital Economy’ embraces all actors in digital value creation processes, as for instance multi-media agencies, e-commerce, interactive online marketing and mobile solutions provider, games developer, social media provider etc.
The Digital Economy is one of the pioneers of Open Innovation since the way firms and employees act on different layers of the innovation system is highly influenced by the immense enabling potential of the Internet with open information flows and easy accessibility to knowledge in online-communities, open source communities, etc. as well as supported by a distinct openness in organizational structures and processes. Open Source projects as well as Web 2.0 applications and business models are striking examples of this pioneering role.
In short, Open Innovation focuses on how to combine different competences or technological capabilities whether they are inside or outside the firm and apply them to commercial ends (Lazzarotti/Manzini 2009; Vanhaverbeke/Cloodt/Van de Vrande 2008). In the Digital Economy we want to distinguish the following archetypes of Open Innovation, following a two-dimensional approach:
I. Bottom-up versus Top-Down
(1) One type of Open Innovation processes start from scratch, is predominantly bottom-up oriented, where there is e.g. a starter-kernel or a common programming context (e.g. tools, languages, environments, goals, etc), but no common project, a common goal or a common organizational context of production. Examples are the Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) or other networks “…scattered across the web in the form of coding blogs (e.g., http://alistapart.com/ for CSS developers, or http://quirk smode. com/ for JavaScript), programming discussion forums (e.g., http://php-forum.com/) and code sharing sites (e.g., http://snipplr.com/)” (Jones/Churchill 2009, p. 196). The characteristics of social interaction in these communities are typically (a) no centralized control over the code base, (b) decentralized hubs with a meshed network of interconnections, (c) many-to-many communication with developers independently seeking individual objectives but interacting with others to achieve their own goals (d) self-organization or self-governance (e.g. peer-reviews as quality control) (e) leadership deriving from competences rather than ownership of assets (Raasch/Herstatt/Abdelkafi 2009, p. 3f.);
(2) Other Open Innovation processes have a decisive common project context, a centralized authority with control over the code base and are typically organized in star-shaped networks with developers only communicating to one central hub. These collaborative development communities are more or less organized top-down with a specific e.g. programming goal.
II. From R&D to application
Besides the principal social interaction characteristics Open Innovation may have different foci in the innovation process drawing a bow from hobbyist development, via research and development to market implementation:
(1) The developer communities mentioned above usually have a center of gravity in (software) development either with or without a common project goal or context. Usually there is a non-market transfer of knowledge between the actors involved in invention, with more or less free flows of knowledge within the community enabled by multilateral conversational interaction (e.g. Yahoo pipes).
(2) There are also those Open Innovation processes that are e.g. centered around an existing enabling technology or software, but with a focus on implementation of an application or business model where there is no further core software development in the sense of altering the code base etc. (e.g. WIKIPEDIA).
At or more or less fuzzy borderline, business orientation arises as an important driver changing the rules of the game. To illustrate our conceptual approach, we want to cluster different already known Open Innovation projects or activities along the two dimensions mentioned above:
In the matrix roughly 2 main areas (which we call “Open Technology” and “Open Content”) as well as 4 quadrants appear where we will illustrate certain known Digital Economy Open Innovation activities. “Open Technology Innovation” is referred to as a technological development matter, where the collaboration is more or less open to all and the innovative source technology is shared, licensed etc. between stakeholders to develop software programs or applications for different fields. “Open Content Innovation” is more an application of technology e.g. to enable and stimulate collaborative innovation and open business models that i.a. allow for crowd-sourcing in different application fields (e.g. social software applications like Web 2.0 platforms).
“Open Source Software” (OSS) Innovation which is defined as “… an innovation, which is (1) generated through volunteer contributions and (2) characterized by a non-market transfer of knowledge between the actors involved in invention and those involved in exploitation…”[1] is probably the best known Open Innovation process which is running for years with great success (best known example = LINUX). These may be considered as predominant bottom-up processes with a variety of development
goals, sometimes very fragmented.[1] The typical outcome of OSS is free available software with access to the program code. Yahoo! Pipes and Apache Commons are also development networks, which may be characterized as Open Technology Innovation, but which are monitored by a central authority. Here bottom-up processes are stimulated by continuous community engineering activities. The SAP Community Network (SCN) is following a clear top-down approach to generate solutions for SAP application problems, but still has roots in bottom-up communities with development fractions. MySQLAb is marking the transition between Open Source Software and proprietary exploitation since it is distributed with a dual-license approach.
“Open Content Innovation” is an analog to Open Source Software and describes “…any kind of creative work, or content, published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual.”[2] Examples for open content projects are WIKIPEDIA, Open Directory Project, Project Gutenberg, Open Gaming Foundation etc. where you find in particular free and openly licensed course materials from universities or MIT courses but also other resources, e.g. Digital Peer Publishing (DIPP) NRW, comprising a series of e-journals with free available scientific content. Social networking websites (like Facebook, MySpace) are examples for Open Content projects, since they allow its users to share their information among each other and with other websites.[3] While these platforms are organized more or less bottom-up there are also social networking sites that comprise more top-down elements like LinkedIn and Xing, the former being more a platform to maintain circles of friends, the latter being more a platform to organize business networks.
This definition of Open Innovation provides the ground for more in-depth investigations how the Digital Economy is working with this new concept. If you are interested in further discussions please also visit our KOPIWA platform by following the link.
[1] Presently there are some 170.000 open source development projects listed in sourceforge.net
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content
[3] Behind these networks you also find Developer Platforms (like the MySpace Developer platform) that supports the development of applications based on e.g. the “OpenSocial model” by providing a standard set of open source APIs that allow Developers to build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled Web site. These APIs enable social networking Web sites such as MySpace to share their social data across the Web. http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/ index.php?title=Category:OpenSocial
[1] Raasch, C./Herstatt, C./Abdelkafi, N. 2009: Open Source Innovation – Characteristics and Applicability Outside the Software Industry, Arbeitspapier No. 53 der Technischen Universität Hamburg-Harburg, S. 4, Source: http://www.tu-harburg.de/tim/downloads/arbeitspapiere/ Arbeitspapier_53.pdf Sphere: Related Content