The innovative Open alternative

Description

Open source is a software development method driven by distributed peer review and transparency of process. The source code of open source software is part of the public domain and hence the software itself is free of charge. The open source community witnessed significant development during the early stages of internet development, with extensive focus on the Linux developing community and Linux-based applications and services. Such solutions are often embraced by Enterprise IT especially because of costs and quality.

Open innovation comes in conflict with open source development with respect to intellectual property and rightful ownership, because of the collaborative nature of intellectual knowledge creation. Hence, the two have a different approach to legal aspects such as copyrights and creative commons, but they are complementary to each other when looking at how open source software plays an important role in competition on the market and how software companies often embrace open source solutions and integrate them with their own products.

The concept of user innovation is strongly based on open source development and argues that innovation in the new economy will be driven by end-users and customers rather than suppliers, and communities such as the Linux open source developers are the ones that shape the future of products, such as in the above example the future of operating systems. For any product, in our case software, the open source community will eventually represent the driving force in development.

Crowdsourcing is one of the brand new approaches that businesses take into consideration for product development, open innovation and marketing strategy. It consists in outsourcing a business function to an unlimited number of people, usually via the internet, by inviting the public to solve a problem or create a design in the set of a competition. Such approach leverages mass collaboration and crowd wisdom, taking the best advantages from open and user innovation.

Open API Applications and mashups are results of the approach of enterprises towards open source and crowdsourcing, presenting great results to their business. Crouwdsourcing and openness in general towards user collaboration becomes a great focus for enterprises and, in a value-driven economy, may represent a great asset to their business and core capabilities.

Enablers

1. Research & Development: the open source communities, big software corporations
2. Applications using open source software partially or fully
3. Funding and promoting open source research by governments and international institutes
4. New orders of the world economy moving towards a value driven network economy
5. Success of open API user applications and mashups
6. Great development of mashups producing powerful business tools
7. Increasing successful use of crowdsourcing in enterprises

Inhibitors

1. Security concerns related to the openness of the source code in open source software
2. Legal concerns related to copyrights and intellectual property
3. Trust issues when allowing open information to public
4. Disappointing results regarding open innovation and crowdsourcing

Paradigms

1. Open source will become the one and only type of development for software
2. The power of user innovation and crowdsourcing will change the way enterprises innovate and do marketing

Web Resources

1. http://www.opensource.org/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Innovation_communities
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_network
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_innovation
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_innovation
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_API
10. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
11. http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199269051