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Mozilla Labs - Open Innovation in the News
Over the last few days two very well written articles about Mozilla Labs in general and the Concept Series in particular were published by BusinessWeek and ZDNet.
BusinessWeek took a broad view of design and innovation in Open Source and published their article “Mozilla Labs Explores Open Source Design” as part of an online special. Dana Blankenhorn from ZDNet wrote a very passionate piece about Labs and our work together with the wider community: “Mozilla Labs where the future is being made today”.
Both articles are testament of the amazing Mozilla Labs community, the creativity and passion of each and every participant in our Design Challenges and what we accomplished together.
Currently we are working hard on building better tools, better programs, more outreach and create more opportunities to participate — I can’t wait to see what 2010 has in store for us!
To end with, I couldn’t have said it any better myself — in Dana’s words: “Try things out. Play - Play is where great ideas come from.”
Lessons from Mozilla - Open Innovation & Crowd Sourcing
We recently were invited to present Mozilla Labs at a workshop on open innovation and crowdsourcing organized by Eric von Hippel (MIT) and Karim Lakhani (HBS). The workshop brought academics and practitioners from organizations such as General Mills (food), Ford (automobile), Pitney Bowes (services) and the World Bank (finance) together, and had each present the specific implementation of crowdsourcing at their respective organization.
Below you’ll find my deck on Mozilla Labs’ approach, experiments, results and challenges in the wider area of crowdsourcing - aptly named “Lessons from Mozilla - How we are learning to foster and grow participation”.
Flipping through this deck, I realize that this also acts as a good update on what Mozilla Labs worked on in the last 12 months in relation to the Concept Series and Design Challenge.
Generation Github
1,205,808… More than 1.2 million people are using Github today.
A whole generation of developers & hackers all around the world are growing up with Github deeply embedded into their developer DNA. This is a whole generation of people for whom sharing code is the default (the vast majority of code repositories on Github are public - you have to pay for private repos). A whole generation which not only consumes Open Source software and code but decided that keeping code private is just not important anymore.
This is the future. Learn, share and innovate in the open. It’s all about execution, not your intellectual property.
Now - go and check out what those 1.2 million hackers put into their more than 3.5 million code repositories. Learn from it. Share and give back. And let’s create the third wave of Internet startups (after the first boom & bust in the late 90s and the current wave of social/web 2.0/whatever startups) which are built on top of the deeply ingrained ethos of Generation Github.
I can’t wait!
Image Credits: Baracktocat by Cameron McEfee
Innovate in the Open!
Today I had the great honor & pleasure of keynoting the Technology Convergence Conference 2012, talking about Open Innovation, Mozilla and how to apply all this to your business.
The summary of my talk reads:
Open Innovation, Crowd Sourcing, Community-driven Innovation, Chaords (describing organizations which are a mixture of Chaos and Order) - the world around us is using “open” as the new default. Fearless leaders are unleashing the beast which redefines the core of many innovation practices. Pascal Finette recounts the inspiring story of Mozilla, the Open Source non-profit organization which managed to break Microsoft’s stronghold on the browser market and today has more than 450 million users worldwide. Alongside this fascinating David vs Goliath tale you will learn how Mozilla won by being completely open, working with the wider community and redefining how innovation can be done. At the end of his session, Pascal will have enabled you to tame the beast and make it work for you and your organization.
Here’s the deck:
The Mozilla Way - Innovate in the Open
It all began with a rather innocent question: After experiencing the amazing qualities of operating completely in the open here at Mozilla, creating and leading some very exciting Open Innovation projects such as Mozilla’s Design Challenges & since last year our WebFWD accelerator program and thinking, analyzing, discussing and talking more and more about Open Innovation and how we do things here at Mozilla… wouldn’t it be great if we document this knowledge and thus enable more organizations to benefit from it?
This lead to a slightly less innocent tweet:
And so here we are – I am going to write this thing. And use this blog as a testbed for ideas, text fragments, discuss interesting source material I find elsewhere and generally rant about my inability to express myself properly in the English language.
To be clear: Anything I write will only be possible because I stand on the shoulders of giants. So many awesome people have done so much amazing work on this - both inside and outside of Mozilla. I am just a messenger.
Join me for the ride - and please provide feedback!
Mon, Feb 13th, 2012
Putting my money where my mouth is
Two days ago I mentioned that I intend to write a book about Open Innovation (the Mozilla way).
I am thinking about finding a company (ideally not in tech) which is interested in implementing an Open Innovation strategy into their business process and which would like my support/help to do so. It would help me refine my thinking and gain insights into challenges, problems and opportunities outside of Mozilla’s world and hopefully would help the company on their own journey (and make the book more useful).
This is all still pretty raw in terms of thinking - but do let me know if you represent such a company (ideally mid to large size) and are interested.
Innovate in the Open (TCC Keynote)
Here’s the video of my keynote at this year’s Teladata Technology Convergence Conference where I talked about “Innovate in the Open”.
My Open Innovation Article on Fast Company
Head over to Fast Company to read my article on “5 Lessons For Using Open Innovation To Maximize The Wisdom Of The Crowd” - it’s one of my better ones (I think). :)
And please know - I wouldn’t have been able to write this article if not for the superior work of some of the smartest people I know. I couldn’t give them credit in my article, so I do it here:
John Lilly, who essentially developed the framework I lay out in the article. Watch his amazing talk about the “7 Lessons from Mozilla” at Wordcamp 2009, read his blog and follow him on Twitter. He’s one of the smartest and nicest people I know.
Asa Dotzler, who taught me Mozilla. His intuitive understanding of community and what it means to be a Mozillian formed my thinking about the power of being an open organization. You should read his blog and follow him on Twitter - he’s smart and outspoken.
Mitchell Baker, who keeps pushing me to think about what’s important, why it matters and how we can make it better - in the open. Every time I become comfortable with where I am and what I think I know, I sit down with her. She continues to challenge me in the very best possible way. Read her blog and follow her on Twitter if you want to understand Mozilla on a fundamental level.
Chris Beard and Todd Simpson, who in their capacity as my bosses allowed and encouraged me to experiment, try things out, risk failure and celebrate success.
Karim Lakhani, Eric von Hippel and Kevin Boudreau, who are way out there when it comes to think about open innovation and from whom I have learned so much. I wish I could spent more time in their proximity.
The whole Mozilla community which taught me The Mozilla Way.
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
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