I couldn’t agree more. There is an overlap but they are not the same — orthogonal concepts or at best correlated (See Fig 5.1).

Firms that want to make money off of open source need a revenue model — a point that Chesbrough makes and that so many companies either ignore or underestimate. Will a big company cross-subsidize an open source effort indefinitely? Sun pulled out of Mozilla pretty quickly, and while IBM is a major player in Linux and Apache they‘re not carrying the whole load.

I think open source has succeeded wildly as a way to commoditize software or to let (very smart) users share their solutions. As a business model, the jury is still out.

Many thanks for your insightful comments. I particularly agree with the following:

>Symbian’s experience in the broad field of eco-system management is a given. That said the community stewardship challenges are complex and the situation (with any community) always in flux; what worked yesterday, therefore, may not work as well today.

Getting this right is going to be of mission critical importance for many software companies. A new breed of leaders is going to emerge with a skill-set focused on the stewardship of external resource communities, with much of the deep expertise needed to handle the more complex issues passing into the hands of the specialists.

I look forward to further exploring the essence of this emerging new skill-set.

// dw2-0

There’s more to open innovation than open source. I would agree. I see open source broadly as a means to an end, not an end in itself (for Symbian and others). Moving to open source does reduce the entry barriers and should lead to more users and external developers experimenting with the system, as you say. Having more people experimenting with the system helps, but this is not sufficient in itself to qualify as an end objective of course. Nor do I believe in fact, that it is sufficient to target to successfully stimulate “Open Innovation”, difficult as that is to realise in practical terms as you point out.

I think to get the roadmap right you have to look to the likely shape and form of successful software companies in the future, and here I envisage a blurring of the lines of distinction between internal and external resources with both factions empowered to influence the direction of the new “corporate organism” – I make no apologies for the use of the biological term as I think this best captures the likely scale of the leadership and change management challenges which confront us going forward.

If we use this simple “corporate organism model” as a lamp to illuminate the darkness, several things become evident (building on Henry Chesbrough’s open innovation mindset thinking):

• Most of the really smart people don’t work for us.
• Companies that leverage the external as well as the internal might survive. Companies which do not adequately leverage the external will not survive.
• Companies that are “best in class” at leveraging the external will win.

That there are issues with both the incorporation of external innovations and with motivating the external contributors I would also agree. With regard to the latter point I have observed that even the issue of responding to external innovations proves challenging for some in the open-source space!

Part of the problem lies with the very concept of “product”. Go back to the time of the Austin 10, and it was black, no other colours were offered (so I’m told, before my time I’m afraid!). With a product (read one size fits all) mentality one tends to push back on user/external innovations, preferring instead to lean purely on internal thought leaders for direction on product specification etc. Coming from a services background myself, I’m more inclined to think in terms of solutions; the customer gets what he requires to meet a business need.

Moving to the point of encouraging external innovation, and then putting in place the infrastructure to enable that innovation, will require a quantum leap in thinking for some organisations, and I suspect for many the chasm will be just too wide.

To get it right you certainly need the mix of education and evangelism, the active listening, the platform flexibility and the rewards systems which you have mentioned.

I would formalise this by saying that:
• You need to create an “environment” for external/internal collaboration, in the broadest sense of the word. There are many facets to this.
• You need strategies to motivate a stream of people to get involved with your evolving corporate organism in the first place. Clearly it is not enough to simply nurture new developers; you need to create a strong “pull” to attract star players away from the competition.
• You need strategies to motivate people to innovate around the issues on a day to day basis i.e. to actively engage once involved.
• You need to provide elements of vision/leadership (direction) and operational management befitting the culture of your external community. This is important. Taking “open” to the point of abdicating responsibility for providing “direction” (as some appear to) is unlikely to produce optimal results.
• You need to provide a clear reward infrastructure (whatever the mix) which works reliably and in a timely manner.
Symbian’s experience in the broad field of eco-system management is a given. That said the community stewardship challenges are complex and the situation (with any community) always in flux; what worked yesterday, therefore, may not work as well today.
Getting this right is going to be of mission critical importance for many software companies. A new breed of leaders is going to emerge with a skill-set focused on the stewardship of external resource communities, with much of the deep expertise needed to handle the more complex issues passing into the hands of the specialists.
In the meantime developers looking for a good return on their investment would be well advised to keep a close eye on the Symbian Foundation’s activities over the coming months, I suspect.

Harry Wilson
Managing Partner
Greenflash Consulting
greenflash@in2euro.com
14th August 2008