Looking back at his former life as senior vice president of research at IBM (IW 500/10), Paul Horn remembers a time before open innovation -- a competitive, suspicious era when innovative and great, transformative ideas were only allowed to grow in a tightly sealed vacuum.
"When we built the Almaden Laboratory at IBM in the early 1980s, we put it south of Silicon Valley on purpose," he recalls. "In those days, our biggest fear was the leaking of intellectual property out into the valley."
See Also: Manufacturing Innovation & Product Development Strategy
The worry was not how to get ideas in from an open environment, he says, but how to keep people out.
Fast forward a few decades, and that model has been totally reversed.
Today's research breaks down the walls of the labs, of the compartmentalized business units, of even the company itself. The secrecy of yesterday's insolated IP practices has given way to a new model that pulls in fresh ideas and finds thought leaders across the world, across industries and across competing markets -- a global exchange from the masses to the enterprise: a global crowdsourcing innovation system.
And the current king of this model is that old king of innovation, GE (IW 500/6).
Crowdsourcing the Future
"For any industry to be successful, you really need to develop communities or ecosystems of partners and thought leaders," says Christine Furstoss, technical director of Manufacturing and Material Technologies at GE Global Research.
"No sustainable, established industry technology exists without multiple players, multiple styles of thought, multiple ways of growing," she explains. "We feel like one of the best ways to stimulate that, to find the newest and best ideas, is to start with open collaboration."
