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The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice write-up of an interview with Professor Henry Chesbrough- Open innovation guru, Harvard Business School Professor Henry Chesbrough, has written papers on the need to develop more flexible and open business models across the board. Companies need to get a lot better at bringing external ideas and knowledge in from the outside, while at the same time allowing internal ideas not being used to flow outside the organization. However, the writer gives too much credit to open source by implying that it represents open innovation.I know most large organizations dismiss this as academic debate - one CEO told me last week that open source models are great in theory and disastrous in reality. I can understand his scepticism. Relinquishing control of product development to scores of unknown individuals? Talk about flying in the face of every business instinct. Chesbrough and co-authors explained the distinction between open innovation and open source in Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford, 2006)-...we would not mean to suggest that all open source software is an example of Open Innovation– or for that matter, that all open innovation in the IT industry relates to open source software.
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…open source is only Open Innovation if it has a business model. Further, Chesbrough and co-authors were explicit about the role of patents in open innovation. This (patent) incentive will clearly be especially important for firms that cannot easily access or acquire the complementary assets required to profitably commercialize their inventions... patents play an important role in promoting vertical specialization in R&D by limiting the hazards faced by specialized technology developers.
posted by Noel Le @ 1:05 PM | Academia
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