The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

Source: Mother Board 

I am watching the video right now, so I will blog on it properly in a while. Chesbrough’s talk begins 21 minutes into the video and spans to 1 hour and 5  minutes of it.

Creative Commons Salon: Open Services Innovation from Creative Commons on Vimeo.

Take me to the survey   

Panel includes:

1. Todd Park – CTO of HHS and co-founder of Athena Health
2. Eric Schmidt - CEO of Google
3. Aneesh Chopra – CTO of US
4. John Doerr - partner at Kleiner Perkins

The audience is asked to structure the talk by setting up questions and points of discussion. They include:

• Standardization of electronic medical records (EMR)
• Government barriers and accelerators to electronic healthcare
• The return on investment (RoI) of electronic healthcare
• Accountability that needs to be expected not just from the government, technology, and healthcare providers but ALSO from the patients to provide accountable and correct information
• What role is Google playing in electronic healthcare records (EHR), and provision? Should it play a role?
• What is the biggest potential of the cloud in the provision and management of electronic healthcare by the government?
• What is the role of open source in electronic healthcare?
• What are the incentive schemes, and the greatest barriers to innovation coming from the government for electronic healthcare?
• How do you ‘create’ change and enable it when healthcare providers and physicians seem resistant to change? And change management in general?
• What, if any, role does social media and apps play in electronic healthcare provision?

Four Reasons To Pay Extra For Software Freedom from SFScon.

This is a very logical talk that steps through licenses (at a broad level) and then progresses to umbrella business models. It ends with the various challenges and issues brought about by vendor lock-in and the confusion the word ‘free’ has created for widespread commercial acceptance of open source.

Courtesy of Professional Outsourcing

Leslie has an amazing sense of humour! But more to the point, his interview provides keen insight into government procurement concerns, especially in relation to cloud computing. Leslie draws on his own research to explain how there is a need for innovation, change, development of centres of excellence, and ‘people capability’ in the government to make better use of cloud computing. This could lead to a more agile organization or as he terms it “cloud-corporation”.

Professor Gary Hamel was also present on the audio call talk. Chesbrough explained his new research and ideas that build on the idea of open services innovation rather than just product innovation. He began with some basics about what is innovation, and open innovation by explaining how nobody has a monopoly on great and new ideas, and how companies need to make more use of the ideas of others. He called for companies to liberate the material and ideas that are held internally with the rest of the world (so long as they are not your core competence, of course). If many companies followed such a model of sharing then we would see more innovation. Using the example of drug discovery he showed how the same discovery can help lead to the cure of more than one disease.

The larger problem here, he acknowledged was that companies and management are built to have an implicit logic of NOT sharing as internal promotion systems etc are all tightly linked to ideas of keeping information to yourself and not sharing. There is active discouragement of sharing.

Such a mindset and internal structures do not allow companies to change. Linking the idea of holding on to the status quo and non-sharing, Chesbrough brought the argument around to the big problem he sees in product innovation – It is limiting, or as he puts it, companies fall into the ‘commodity trap’. Commodity trap simply means that organizations become dependent on merely innovating the product internally. You are thus only as good as your next product. But what makes it harder to sustain differentiation and success is that you can only rely on internal ideas and innovation, and that too in the products area (limited to the design of your last product and how you will you upgrade it etc…. but also new products in a similar area). On the other hand Chesbrough’s research has shown that companies like IBM indicate that more than half of their profit comes from services (this was back in 2004). Why is this not matched with a focus on services innovation then?

Clarifying his ideas, Chesbrough explains that products are not important in themselves – it is the service they deliver that a customer wants. For instance a drill makes holes and it is the hole that the customer wants and not the tool per se. See his slide below on utilization differential.

Open services innovation is one way to avoid the commodity trap. Open services innovation implies building deeper relationships with your customers so you can find other ways of adding value and working closer with each other. He provides three different examples (from various industries to prove that his model does not only apply to technology – Amazon, El Bulli, and TSMC). Opening up your backend infrastructure leads to more innovation.

Some questions asked by the audience:

Q: How does open services innovation avoid the commodity trap?

Chesbrough: Open source business models allow for collaboration at one level and then competition higher up in the stack, the same is true for open services innovation.

Q: How do you differentiate in services models? (asked Chesbrough of himself)

Chesbrough: Services platforms!

Q: If I am in a traditional entrenched Fortune 500 company what do I do to make a change of such a drastic nature in my organization?

Chesbrough: Rethinking management in fundamental ways  is never easy. You could start with an experiment that you can control. Look to your customers for inspiration and observe how they use your products.

Q: How do I retrain my boss to exhibit values of open innovation?

Chesbrough: I feel the commodity trap example helps to dissuade managers from becoming too entrenched.

Q: How does one use the lessons of open innovation and translate them to social innovation?

Chesbrough: Use the platform to innovate with ideas, as you would for products and services.

Professor Gary Hamel asks Professor Chesbrough: Platforms are competing with each other like Apple versus Android (Google)? You say there is no longer a first mover advantage? So where is the advantage?

Chesbrough: We are not beyond competition. It is clearly not a first mover issue these days but companies can gain by building a more robust and faster working network.

Instead of a clumsy clump of cement that I attempt, with my brain, to sort out every day and smooth the rough edges, Nuno explained how that in itself represents the chaos, complexity and recalcitrance of research ideas before they are moulded into a polished one. Of course, it can be said that we never really have a polished idea as such – we just gently muscle the data and our research question to a more harmonious fit. Anyway, I won’t go on about data collection, theoretical fit, and abstracting from both to contribute to knowledge, but I will say that this strange monstrosity on the side of the NAB makes me more reluctant now to even it out. I wonder what the busy London passer-by on Kinsgway thinks of our art .