This link has been bookmarked by 60 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Nov 2006, by Pankaj.
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21 Feb 13
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Recently, an internal science team at a U.S.-based major biotechnology firm was assigned to develop a method for rapid and simple detection of DNA sequences in unconventional field settings. Their mission was to produce a DNA sequencing test that was cost effective, robust, and operable in extreme field conditions. After several months of effort, the team in consultation with company experts concluded that no viable solution existed for their problem. Since solving the problem was of critical importance for the firm, management decided to break from convention and the disclose the specifics of the problem to a large group of unknown "outside" scientists requesting a solution in return for substantial prize money.
Most people take knowledge and information from their back pockets and transfer it to the problem at hand.
In a four-week period of time, over 574 scientists investigated the problem statement and forty-two of them submitted potential solutions for considerations. The winning solution was proposed by a scientist from Finland who did not work in this field. The solution involved the novel application of an existing methodology to the problem at hand. Besides solving the problem, the solution information opened up a new knowledge domain for future investigations and resulted in a valuable patent for the firm. This case example illustrates how the disclosure and wide dispersion of scientific problem information allows R&D organizations to access a broader range of scientific knowledge, and can help accelerate internal and proprietary research efforts.
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11 Apr 12
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27 Sep 11
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27 Oct 10
KPI_Library BookmarksQ&A with Karim R. Lakhani by Martha Lagace, published in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, November 20 2006. Lakhani's "research analyze[ed] how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists."
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25 Oct 10
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Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.
That's the view of Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists.
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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.
People often think about open source as a special case, as if such openness can only happen in software.
The study and its findings are described in his paper "The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving," coauthored with Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta. It describes how broadcast search was used with 166 distinct scientific problems from the research laboratories of twenty-six firms from ten countries over a four-and-a-half year period.
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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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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.
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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.
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In our study the average time spent by successful solvers was two weeks, so that's fairly little in the scheme of things.
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A: 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.
Q: In open source, the solvers' names become known, right?
A: Yes, so reputation matters, use value matters, and so forth. I have conducted a study about motivations in open source communities. People talked about feeling part of a community and being intellectually challenged. In fact, the strongest correlate between time spent on a project and other factors was how a person assessed the creativity in the project. One of the questions we asked open source people was, "Imagine a time in your life when you felt the most creative, and rate this project's creativity with that experience." The more creative they felt in those projects, the more likely they were to participate and spend time, which makes sense. So fun and the enjoyment of problem solving fit together in open source.
In our study of scientific problem solving, most people were not going to win yet still participated. We saw that, on average, 240 people seriously looked at each problem statement and then, on average, ten submitted solutions. When you look at the ten people who submitted solutions and see that they expended anywhere from thirty-five to seventy-five hours' worth of time, what motivates them is a critical question. We've found that 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. They found it to be stimulating and fun, and both of those were strong indicators. Enjoyment and the challenge of learning was the strongest correlate of being a successful solver. But money was also important and it was a significant correlate.
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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. Unfortunately, the models right now are "Close, close, close" or "Open all the way." I definitely think that if they could take a best solution and put it back out there for review and comment, they might actually go down a pathway of improvement that they didn't anticipate.
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Q: What research is next for you?
A: My hope is to systematically examine the application of open source principles to settings outside of software and to also track the real performance of these methods to concrete problem-solving situations.
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I am also interested in studying the intersection of firms and communities and the emergence of hybrid models of organizations that blend and blur firms and communities.
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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. I'll be working with them on some experiments to see what happens to performance when there are constraints on collaboration and the introduction of IP rights.
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Last, we've seen open source communities evolve and now open source nonprofit foundations are setting up their own for-profit companies to compete with traditional software companies. A key question for them is "How can you to channel volunteers around the world to work with you and still be a money-making company?" So I'm investigating these hybrid models and trying to understand how firms and communities can jointly benefit from these new models of collaboration.
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12 Jun 09
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10 Jun 09
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09 Jun 09
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02 May 09
Bill HookerBorrowing a practice that is common in the open source software community, HBS professor Karim R. Lakhani and colleagues decided to see how "broadcasting" might work among scientists trying to solve scientific problems. The results? Promising for many typ
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31 Oct 08
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03 Jan 08
KurtInteresting article on using open-source principles for scientific research
f1tshaw opensource research science socialsoftware collaboration academic innovation
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17 Dec 07
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07 Oct 07
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31 Jul 07
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27 Jul 07
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14 Jun 07
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"The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving,"
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Thanks to broadcasting, nearly one-third of the previously unsolved problems found successful solutions.
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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.
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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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13 Mar 07
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05 Mar 07
Michel Bauwens"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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20 Dec 06
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14 Dec 06
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13 Dec 06
Howard RheingoldIs there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.
collaboration cooperation innovation collective_intelligence knowledge sharing_economy
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That's the view of Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists.
-
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.
-
The study and its findings are described in his paper "The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving," coauthored with Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta. It describes how broadcast search was used with 166 distinct scientific problems from the research laboratories of twenty-six firms from ten countries over a four-and-a-half year period. Problems involved everything from biotech to consumer products and agrochemicals.
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Q: What are the risks of opening problems to outsiders?
A: 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.
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Q: I found it amazing in your research that outsiders were most likely to find a solution.
A: Yes. 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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n a four-week period of time, over 574 scientists investigated the problem statement and forty-two of them submitted potential solutions for considerations. The winning solution was proposed by a scientist from Finland who did not work in this field. The solution involved the novel application of an existing methodology to the problem at hand. Besides solving the problem, the solution information opened up a new knowledge domain for future investigations and resulted in a valuable patent for the firm. This case example illustrates how the disclosure and wide dispersion of scientific problem information allows R&D organizations to access a broader range of scientific knowledge, and can help accelerate internal and proprietary research efforts.
-
Q: In open source, the solvers' names become known, right?
A: Yes, so reputation matters, use value matters, and so forth. I have conducted a study about motivations in open source communities. People talked about feeling part of a community and being intellectually challenged. In fact, the strongest correlate between time spent on a project and other factors was how a person assessed the creativity in the project. One of the questions we asked open source people was, "Imagine a time in your life when you felt the most creative, and rate this project's creativity with that experience."
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11 Dec 06
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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.
-
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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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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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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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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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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04 Dec 06
Edward BermudezPeople often think about open source as a special case, as if such openness can only happen in software.
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03 Dec 06
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27 Nov 06
Nancy WhiteBorrowing a practice that is common in the open source software community, HBS professor Karim R. Lakhani and colleagues decided to see how "broadcasting" might work among scientists trying to solve scientific problems. The results? Promising for many typ
collaboration open_source research online_facilitation for:unorder
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26 Nov 06
InnaOpen Source Science: A New Model for Innovation
collaboration academic community creative innovation knowledge management technology science research OpenSource model
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25 Nov 06
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24 Nov 06
Luis OopshIn 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.
opensource basic open infolibre commonmanag cc a-gestion colaborasocial crish oopsh ciber redes softsocial popmkt
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22 Nov 06
April DunfordOn motivation to participate - "Enjoyment and the challenge of learning was the strongest correlate of being a successful solver. But money was also important and it was a significant correlate. "
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21 Nov 06
Tom HemingwayIn 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.
-
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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20 Nov 06
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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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