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Opening Up Is Good For Innovation
from the building-on-the-work-of-others... dept
It's been said plenty of times here (and many, many other places of course) that innovation is the process of building on the works of others to make something even better. It's not something that happens in a vacuum -- and closing off innovators is a recipe for suffocating innovation. It appears that more research is supporting this. Future Now is pointing to research being done that shows innovators tend to network with each other across company boundaries, and that helps them to share ideas and increase innovation. While top executives think that the researchers they hire should stay hidden in order to build top secret proprietary stuff, it turns out that more innovation occurs when researchers have easy and open access with others working on similar problems at other companies. Ideas and information flows across company borders, but the end result is more and better innovation for everyone. One of these days, perhaps, executives will realize how that works.
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Need More Convincing
Executives probably are worried that sharing research will give their company a minor (or no) benefit but a competitor will get a huge benefit.
What is needed is a study showing that companies with "open border" research policies are more profitable than those with "closed border" policies.
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indeed... opening up (source code) accelerates inn
Yep,
Opening up and sharing knowledge with others in every branch of society
Just look at how Linux has evolved. In the beginning , the installation process was very old-fashioned and very FreeBSD like. You could only install it using the command line interface. (console)
Nowadays, it's a whole new ballgame. You have Linux distributions like SimplyMEPIS 2004.04 that allow you to use it as a Live CD and if you like it, install it to the harddisk in 10 minutes.
This is the power of open-source that leads to more innovation than even Microsoft can provide.
Regards,
Mark
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