Introduction:

Open Business – crowdsourcing an entire business. Developing, promoting, distributing and selling a product through crowdsourcing. How do we set up an “open company” or federation? Goal-oriented network.

Trends emerging on the web with respect to product hacking. People are taking products that already exist and “reappropriating” or repurposing them. People are also developing FLOSS software. Want to create a business model around this – making services and products happen from the community. Tap into the crowd of knowledgeable hobbyists and designers. People who have part of the skill-set required to bring a product to market but not the whole set of skills. Untapped potential.

Examples:

• Instructables.com
• etsy.com
• hack spaco
• Bitch and stitch
• Geek up
• Bar camp

Issues:

• What motivates people: identify correct drivers to motivate people.
• How do you  do project management of volunteers.
• Momentum / speed: volunteers and free time – maintaining momentum.
• commercialisation
• Evolution
• Critical mass – location specific critical mass
• Customer expectation (customer created expectation)

Ideas / solutions

Open brand – people associate brands with their experience expectation. E.g. many people have an expectation of what happens at a barcamp despite the fact that they started off as unstructured events. Who do you allow access to your brand? Reputation maintenance. Management.

Shared resources – marketing resources, provision of services and goods. Can generate revenue from providing services to shared environments. Providing access to the market.

Clarity of focus and tasks: briefs. Define tasks down to the level where people can autonomously understand what you want to achieve and let them find solutions. Requirements management and business analysis.

Leadership and vision. Make it as easy as possible for the meme to spread. Create on- and off-line focus points around which things can be made to happen.

Discussion:

People talking about network businesses. A person is at the centre of a network of associates that work together to collaborate on projects under a particular brand. Many-to-many mappings between individuals and brands. Different way of organising your working life than traditional freelancing, which is 1-to-1 mapping between individual and brand (if any).

Attempting to remove reliance on centralised distribution and marketing channels.

How can open values be sustained? GPL-style licensing of products. No patents. Creative Commons etc? Difficult to commercialise as nobody owns the product – not even the company selling it. Open-source hardware licenses are still evolving. One difficulty is that hardware costs money to reproduce whereas software doesn’t.

Value in intellectual property is for investors. Also value in brands. There is no such thing as a “Creative patent” or “Creative trademark” to match “Creative Commons” for copyright. Branding commons don’t really exist yet.

How many things need to be reinvented for this to work? Need to map legal, commercial, financial, social conventions and how they need to be changed to make this happen.

The value of this organisation is contained within its methodologies and business processes. Also the strength of the brand – the reputation and the relationships that you build up.

Pilot project would be a good way of exploring how to proceed. Pick one that looks like it’ll cover most of the areas you want to explore and has some kind of intrinsic interest. Build from there. There’s no example of a successful large, complex system that didn’t evolve from a small, simple system!

BugLabs

Core element wrt commercialisation is the market layers and the interfaces between the consumers and the producers. Provide a focal point between these two layers and broker deals – charge a fee for this.

Starter: is it possible to develop a product in an open source and shared way with distributed development? Answer: yes. How is this going to be different to how it’s been done in the past. How to distinguish this market / service / company from what currently exists?

Potential in empowering people to contribute and do things that they wouldn’t otherwise have done: facilitates new market resources.

Documentation is going to be a key issue. Clarity of process for each role is required to maintain consistency and enable interoperability between business process steps.

Government strategy that ties in with this:

Lots of money in the last budget put aside to foster connections within certain industries: technology strategy board is tasked with deciding which areas of UK industry are worthy of support and how to do that. They create Knowledge Transfer Networks. Bring together people from unis, businesses, entrepreneurs etc. 80% of this cash goes to the “usual suspects” and it doesn’t trickle down very well. Large organisations are constrained in what information they give out about product development.

New website being developed to enable communication between companies in a secure way that enables people to know what will happen to the information they share, such that they are encouraged to share info and transfer knowledge. Publicise the available funding and distribute it more widely.

System allows groups to be created and for people to join groups. Need to encourage more people and organisations, schools, companies, individuals etc should be encouraged to join this system and exchange ideas. Enables discovery of people who can help you put together a network to support a business process.

This launches into private beta in October. Expected final launch in March next year.

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