Towards Open Innovation and Open Science

Berlin.
The first keynote of the Berlin Symposium is by Oliver Gassmann, whose focus is on societal innovation. He notes the changes to communication which are associated with the popularisation of the Internet over the past twenty years; when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, for example, there were no online platforms to tweet the news; there was no Google to search for information with.

In 2010, some 107 trillion emails were sent; Facebook has 800 million users (and 35 million update their profiles every day); but we still don’t live entirely ‘virtual’ lives – rather, the Net has become central to our actual lives. This also raises significant privacy concerns, of course; in Germany and Switzerland, there were substantial concerns about Google Streetview, for example, but at the same time we also give a great deal of information about ourselves away freely all the time.

1.3 million tweets are now sent per hour; supposedly, teenagers’ thumbs are now better developed because of the greater use of mobile devices for SMSes and other real-time updates. Lady Gaga has more Twitter followers than Switzerland has citizens; each Internet user searches via Google and other engines some 74 times per month; one in seven marriages in the U.S. involve couples who met online; 1200 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every hour (in two months, that adds up to more material than ABC, NBC, and CBS combined have aired since 1948).

What are the implications of all of this? On the one hand, it empowers consumers: when United Airlines baggage handlers broke one of musician Dave Carroll’s guitars in transit, a video he made about this went viral and severely affected the company’s stock price, for example. This is a question of consumer rights – but also of corporate rights. Internet business, too, is done today mainly by start-up companies; traditional corporations have a much harder time establishing themselves as major online players.

Further, what about collaborative models, like open source software – what are the motivations of participants, what is re-used, how do such solutions perform, and what business models apply? Several companies have opened up their innovation processes to such models: Cisco did so simply by acquiring the innovative start-ups they identified; Procter & Gamble pursue a connect-and-develop strategy where they identify and collaborate with promising external partners; IBM set up industry solution labs; and BASF created innovation networks. This is a shift from a ‘the lab is my world’ attitude to ‘the world is my lab’.

Some of this falls into the ‘crowdsourcing’ category, of course, where technology and ideation, designers and freelancers intersect. This fundamentally changes industrial relations, too – how can participants be protected from exploitation if standard union models for industrial solidarity and action no longer apply, for example? At the same time, it also opens up innovation processes to new participants, of course – ideas sourced through Innocentive originate from all over the world, for example. How do such collaborative, crowd processes work, anyway – is there any evidence of real swarm intelligence, for example, or do they just follow the law of big numbers?

Another area being opened up is science – alternatives to the traditional peer review process are beginning to be explored. The number of scholarly journals has grown substantially; the conventional peer review system is overloaded and not necessarily entirely accountable or effective; and as a result, the knowledge diffusion process is very slow. Scholars themselves, too, often still cling to the peer review process; a recent experiment by Science to trial open reviewing did not work.

The success of such open science processes depends on what fields it is being attempted in; they have worked in quantum physics and medicine, for example, but not in economics. Increasing the acceptance of open science is more than just a matter of PR; high standards and peer recognition are needed, and these processes are field-dependent, too.

More broadly, how does the Net drive new patterns of innovation; how do new models based around openness emerge and establish themselves as going concerns? Research must move from ivory tower concentration to knowledge brokering (whoever gets their knowledge out first tends to become the market leader); there need to be more networks in science along the value chain, too (which may also be driven by policies promoting cluster formation); more global research networks need to be created (as is perhaps happening with Internet of Things research); more transdisciplinary research must be attempted; approaches to patenting must change to move from a defensive to a multiplicative utilisation of patents; and legal issues, especially also including privacy aspects, need to be highlighted further.

Today’s interdisciplinary research will become tomorrow’s disciplines; perhaps the Institute for Internet and Society is another contributor to the establishment of Internet studies as a discipline, therefore. This must also be a search for the key problems to be addressed – not just about searching solutions to existing problems.