Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation — HBS Working...

In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

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The problem may reside in one domain of expertise and the solution may reside in another.

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Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines.

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they had never thought about the possibility of scientists in other disciplines looking at their problem, reconceptualizing it, and coming up with a solution that could be off-the-shelf. So when they actually see solutions from this type of method, they're blown away.

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In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

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What he and his coauthors discovered: "broadcasting" or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions. Indeed, it was outsiders—those with expertise at the periphery of a problem's field—who were most likely to find answers and do so quickly.

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In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

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"Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines. People have talked about that a lot and I think we're providing some systematic evidence now with this study," Lakhani says.

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Open source collaboration is a very different model for innovation and product development than most firms are used to. I began to wonder where we might see similar patterns occur outside the software domain. In open source communities we see a vast degree of openness in which everybody can participate, but also the practice of broadcasting your work to everybody else. People continually broadcast their problems, others broadcast solutions, and the person with the problem is not always the one with the solution. Oftentimes, somebody else can make sense of both what the problem has been and what people are proposing as solutions, and can come up with a better answer.

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Open source software developers are very pragmatic and focused on solving problems. Scientists are focused on problems too, but their priority is often publication and that can sometimes come in the way of openness and sharing. The ideals of science are, of course, openness, sharing, and no restrictions on the free flow of knowledge, but in practice that doesn't happen much at all. Some scientists, however, are pushing back and many say they need to rethink how they conduct science.

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For firms, the first order risk is the loss of intellectual property, especially if you think about the fact that most firms and scientists believe that the problems they work on are actually their most important things. If you provide hints to competitors, it will reveal a lot of your strategy.

I think it's a legitimate concern, although practice doesn't prove that out in the sense that even if other people know about the problems you're working on or have seen your solutions, it's very hard to implement those solutions in other settings. Knowledge is actually very sticky. Even if you reveal everything about what's going on, there's tacit knowledge behind a lot of scientific and technological activities.

And the benefit of opening up your problems to outsiders is that in fact you can get novel solutions—quicker solutions than what the firm or R&D lab might develop. It also opens up new domains for the pursuit of knowledge and activities.

But it's still a very counterintuitive way of working.

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The problem may reside in one domain of expertise and the solution may reside in another. I've done interviews with scientists who participated by posting problems for broadcast, and most of these scientists were highly skeptical about this method because they considered themselves to be at the top of their discipline. However, they had never thought about the possibility of scientists in other disciplines looking at their problem, reconceptualizing it, and coming up with a solution that could be off-the-shelf. So when they actually see solutions from this type of method, they're blown away.

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We see this in many different places. The insight is that what you want to do is open up your problem to other people—not just to serendipity, but in some systematic way.

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Our findings about motivations are consistent with other distributed innovation communities. The big question in all of these settings is why people would participate given that there's no guaranteed outcome. In the InnoCentive case, there might at least be the promise of a reward: a cash award. Open source has none of that: It's based on sharing.

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the population was divided into two sets of folks: those motivated by money who wanted to win the challenge, and those who enjoyed the problem-solving experience in itself.

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I think that's one of the bigger issues, because the firms that participated were concerned about IP so they didn't feel they could open up the solution process and expose the solution to others. Some other research has shown that, in fact, if you do open up the solution process you can get anywhere from 10X to 100X improvement in problem-solving performance. The ideal process would be to keep it open and get other people to comment on the solutions and perhaps even refine them more.

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When you talk with lawyers, most of them say, "Protect, protect, protect, close, close, close," but there are some very innovative licensing schemes and innovative ways by which you can allow others to peek into your process and not give up the entire keys to the kingdom. I think we just need to find innovative licensing ways or legal regimes that allow people to share knowledge without risking the overall intellectual property of the firm.

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Another study looks at the interaction between intellectual property constraints and collaboration constraints. MathWorks, which makes MATLAB software, has been running a fun "wiki-like" programming contest where anyone can look at anyone else's submission and then resubmit it as their own; and through this competitive collaboration MathWorks has found improvements between 10X and 100X in programming performance.

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