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A tongue-in-cheek history of our favorite paradigm
This new series offers a not-so-serious history lesson about the difficult birth of open innovation and its little brother crowdsourcing. It is a long story to tell, so we have divided it into five little parts: From the golden age of closed innovation, cash-carrying guinea pigs, Mr. Chesbrough’s famous thoughts, users to the lead all the way to open innovation to the fullest.
As we hope that you enjoy the ride we also suggest that you look out of the window once in a while to find out how far along the road your company has come.

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My company is my castle

Castles of Closed Innovation

Everyone knows that all companies around the world follow the same old tradition: we build, you buy. All companies, you might ask?
Well, dear reader, follow us back in the mists of the dark 20th century, when it was safe to say that in fact almost all companies in manufacturing came up with their own nifty ideas, transformed them in to terrific products in their own R&D facilities, produced them in their own steaming factories and finally released their products into the wild rivers of the distribution channels. To keep brief: A company was a castle, and it shall be protected with mighty walls built of occult company secrets and frightening patents.

Xerox the Great and other tales
During the rule of the merciless not-invented-here syndrome, companies sought protection from mysterious foreign technologies that would regularly jam their precious printers, mess up their sleek assembly lines and cheat in the beloved KANBAN card trading game.
Just listen to the story Mr. Chesbrough likes to tell: It was back in the days of the golden age, when Xerox the Great was not content producing its own toner, its own copy-machines and its own light bulbs. No, something just didn’t feel right with this odd paper the kingdom had been buying from some silly strangers. Thus, it was decided that it was best to make, not buy, and henceforth only Xerox paper was to be used within the extensive realms of Xerox.

No one dared to question the superiority of proprietary standards or the fact that companies always knew best what their customers want. It was not until the raging battle of the format war was over, while Sony was busy licking its wounds that a few bards would sing of the grave importance of investigating customer needs before going to war with a new product.

As you might have already expected, these days were as golden as they were numbered: the information age began to besiege the corporate fortresses, and as the reinforced masonries fell one by one, the logic of the closed innovation became as outdated as the infamous mullet. Next up, follow the road to the infamous customer labs…

Are you one of those who have never quite managed to set foot into the virtual world of Second Life? Why? Because you thought your ‘first life’ is just about enough as it is and you’ve just never seen the point in spending your time and money to buy virtual clothing and real estate? Well, just a few days ago, I was one of you. Then this commentary is about to open your eyes on how virtual worlds are apt to change the way online collaboration is done and what the future of open innovation is going to look like.

Ever since I had access to the internet I was fascinated by the possibilities of a connected world, laying just a few mouse-clicks away. However, not only has the internet heavily evolved but also has my usage profile of the web changed overtime. From my first homepage to addictively playing online games, from spending a ’second life’ in social networks to business networking nowadays, I dedicated at least a googol of hours to the internet.

Second Life: Technology of the future or a dying hype?

A few trends though passed me untouched, some of which were UseNet celebrities, online casinos - and virtual worlds. When Linden Lab’s “Second Life” went online in the summer of 2003 I couldn’t have cared less. The technology was coarse; especially the graphics were ugly, the inherent social network way too unfocused and the idea of meeting people that substitute their insufficient real life for a virtual life was not exactly tempting. I just didn’t see the point.

IBM employees experienced the phenomenon of 'immersion'

Six years later, this summer in the German online business platform Xing, I stumbled upon a group in which the possibilities of virtual worlds in business environments are discussed. In one of these discussions, Matthias Eichhoff (Director of Marketing at Second Interest AG) pointed out that virtual worlds are more and more becoming a superior surrogate to video conferences for companies. As participants will eventually build up a commitment to the place and its virtual people, meetings in virtual worlds were apt to replace video conferencing and eventually a lot of business travel.
At first I was very skeptical: As long as the virtual characters just plainly stand next to each other with text bubbles popping up upon their heads and now and then performing a pre-scripted dance move, video conferencing will remain the only substitute for “traditional” business meetings. But after reading about IBM successfully holding its 2008 world conference in a virtual world, I was not so sure about that…
The case study states that people waking up in the morning after the virtual meetings felt like they had actually attended a real meeting in which they interacted with others and carried home practical information.

It seems that immersion really does do the trick, even though graphics are coarse and interaction limited. So by that point I was becoming increasingly interested in virtual worlds. In my mind a vision about the possibilities of online collaboration in virtual worlds started to develop. If only the man-machine-interface would be better. If only gestures and emotions could be seamlessly transferred to the virtual world. What makes face-to-face interaction irreplaceable are gestures and facial expressions. To me, this seemed to be the limiting factor. It is not until some kind of hyper-modern sensor, capable of registering complete body movements and facial expressions in real-time, is available to consumers that virtual worlds will become truly invaluable to companies.

Project Natal: Is this what the future of online collaboration looks like?

Yet, in rare occasions, the future has already begun. In June 2009, Microsoft drew major attention to its newest prodigy, Project Natal, on the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009. The tagline runs something like this: “Leave your game controller at home when you go over to your friend’s house to play Xbox, ‘cause with Project Natal you won’t need it anymore.” That’s great for gamers around the world, really cool…