In This Issue LES Spring Meeting: President's Message: CLP Design Team Seeks Your Input New Alliances Lead To Breakthrough Webinars Sector Spotlight High Technology Sector: Biomedical Devices Committee Inaugural Meeting In San Francisco Healthcare Sector: Mass Collaboration In Licensing: Is Wikinomics For You? LES Winter Meeting: LES Local Chapter Julius Vida Honored With Mentor Award Microsoft VP Issues A Call To Arms For New Voices In The IP Reform Debate LES Annual Meeting: |
Mass Collaboration In Licensing: Is Wikinomics For
You?
Companies' ventures into mass collaboration are causing foundational changes in organizations, society and the economy. The book's colorful, real-world examples illustrate how this is happening. The first they cite is the inspiring story of Goldcorp Inc. The CEO of a struggling Canadian mining firm put massive amounts of geological information on the company Web site and challenged visitors to help them discover whatever gold deposits might remain to be found. He offered $575,000 in prize money and attracted hundreds of virtual gold miners who helped to increase the firm's revenue from $100 million to $9 billion. A more well-known example is inside Procter & Gamble. Even with a team of 9,000 researchers on staff and 27,000 U.S. patents, the company was using less than 10% of its patents in its own products. The CEO contracted with yet2.com, a web-based company that matches those seeking technology with those having technology to sell (think of an electronic matchmaking service). As a result of this effort, P&G projects that 50 percent of its products eventually will come from outside the company. Some notable examples: Crest Whitestrips®, Swiffer® Dusters, and Olay® Regenerist. Now, any P&G patent that is at least five years old or has been in use in a P&G product for at least three years is available to license to any outsider. Through these vignettes and many others, Tapscott and Williams illustrate seven models of collaboration that have the potential to serve two purposes—challenge traditional business processes and enhance economic development—for those companies, from individual entrepreneurs to mega-corporations, that embrace them:
If your company is in business to make money, you need to think seriously about how mass collaboration and open-sourcing fit your business model. Alternatively, you can construct a business model that starts with the results of mass collaboration and create products and services around them. Either way, Wikinomics—the book or its companion Web site (complete with wiki), www.wikinomics.com—can help you navigate from a traditional competitive, controlling culture to a more open, innovative and, in theory, profitable one.
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The authors of Wikinomics (Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,
2006, Portfolio Publishing) make a simple, straightforward assertion: the
more your company invites outsiders to offer insights about your products
and services, the more new ideas you'll have for the pipeline, the
more new products and services you will develop, and the more problems you
will solve. In spite of its title, the book doesn't dwell on wikis,
the software that allows users to edit the content of Web pages, but instead
uses the promise of wikis as a metaphor for the value of mass collaboration.