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Should you be Open Sourcey?
24th March 2010
We think of open source as software – it’s the latest generation of website that allows all this massive interactivity we can do now and we know that open source software developers can currently do no wrong.
Actually this is rapidly becoming the way of the world for business in the future.
Open source enables many people to work on the same problem to come to a solution - and let's be honest - probably delivered free. Mozilla Corp - the developers of Firefox and Thunderbird - is a not-for-profit organisation where all development is done by contributors all over the world doing it for free with project managers in silicon valley merely directing the effort.
Wikipedia has been developed in exactly the same way - anyone can contribute, anyone can change existing entries and Wikipedia just have volunteer project managers around the world who try and ensure some sense and continuity.
Government departments and other organisations in the US are also starting to harness open source contributors to solve problems and one can imagine in the UK for example the RSPB (The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) who use volunteers to report bird sightings going a stage further and using volunteers to analyse and establish bird migration activities and solve long standing conundrums.
It’s not just in the areas of development and analysis, however, that open source can score – also in marketing.
Ford Motor significantly increased sales of their Fiesta car in the US through the use of open source. What Ford did was to give 100 of their cars to 100 families throughout on the proviso only that they regularly Twitter about the car they were now using. There were no other stipulations – maybe a high risk strategy for Ford. The results however were that the Tweets were almost all positive and Fiesta sales went through the roof. They could not have done that without the open source web 2.0 now available.
But what's this got to do with you?
Gold Corp is a Canadian mining company – and like every mining company in the world – it totally and completely relies for its future prosperity on finding new, rich, mineral seams and, not surprisingly in the case of Gold Corp, that mineral is gold.
Every miner in the world protects its information on where such seams might be, and it protects the work of it’s geologists jealously - that is the fundamental competence and core information and it’s something you just never share with anyone.
Gold Corp, however, turned this on its head. They took a high risk decision to actually publish all their geological information going back many years. They put it on the web and invited anybody and everybody into a competition, with a large money prize, to locate the next most likely site for them to mine and find a successful gold seam. They had some thousands of contributors and when they honed this down they had 110 possible sites, 50% of which they did not know of before. The winner received a prize of $½million and this was a site that had not previously been explored, was a rich seam, and resulted in Gold Corp’s share price rising significantly.
Maybe you should be doing the same…
This use of open source is that you make information available on the web -information that maybe in the past has been highly confidential.
You make that available to all- available to your competitors, available to your customers, available to anybody.
Can you take that risk?
It's my view that before long we will all be doing that. In fact there will be very little that is totally confidential. Success in business will then be about moving quickly to develop markets, to develop products, to develop opportunities utilising a significant resource which is not entirely in our pay or control.
It's worth thinking about........
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