There is an interesting thing that is happening in the world of innovation. Whereas before most of the innovation happened in the R&D labs of large enterprises, today, innovation is happening everywhere, all at once. Think back to the days when innovation was all about trials, A/B testing, focus groups, scientific proxies and so on. Now think about how things have changes as the open web has created a whole new frontier of innovation; the crowd in the cloud. Crowd accelerated innovation is happening on the Internet like it has never before. For many organizations, this may represent a threat or an opportunity in terms of moving ahead of the competition or expanding markets. Let’s look at one of the best instances of crowd accelerated innovation and how it is shaping the future of new product development as well as opening up new frontiers for existing products and services.
Open Source Software
Twenty years ago, the word open source sent shivers down the spines of large organizations that had invested billions of dollars in creating proprietary software and designs. Back then, open source software was what torrenting is today; something illegal and left only to the underground world of illegal hackers. Nevertheless, the developer community, which was more interested in collaboration and innovation, continued to push the agenda and the results of that push are open source software platforms such as Linux and Ubuntu. With the advent of these platforms, a few aggregations of developers formed more robust and well organized groupings that undertook very deliberate and unidirectional development and this gave rise to products such as Mozilla. The entrance of large enterprises into this crowd accelerated innovation space was a bit late owing to IP issues and royalty dollars but by and large, there is no stopping technology when it is on the move.
Google Android and Apple iOS
One of the more popular companies that has adopted open source as part of their organizational structure is Google. Their most popular and well known open source offering is their Android operating system. A case in point that proves the power of crowd acceleration is the fact that the platform was released around the same time as Apple’s iOS and has been able to keep up and actually rival the Apple operating system despite the significantly less investment that Google have made into Android. The collaboration of Google with 84 hardware, software and telecommunications companies also created that accelerated innovation ecosystem that has seen Android leapfrog through 7 rapid iterations in five years and diffused in that time to be the preferred operating system running on over 190 million devices across the planet today compared to Apple’s 186 million across three proprietary devices; iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone. Keep in mind Google have no branded Google gadgets and work with third party manufacturers. Their overall market share also grew from 2.8% Q2-2009 to a 33% Q4-2010, an over 1000% increment in one year. This can all be traced back to the open source nature of the platform and the collaborative effort using open source free software licensing models.
This example of crowd accelerated innovation can also be seen through some less tangible factors such as third party apps for the operating systems. The Apple app store has been a phenomenal success. However, one of the biggest issues that many developers have about it is the walled garden approach that Apple has adopted. On the other hand, the Android market is a much more free market and it gives many developers the much needed leeway in terms of development. From its introduction in 2008, the Android market has zipped to over 350,000 apps with over 6 billion apps installed compared to Apple’s 500,000 apps and 10 billion downloads in a similar period respectively, but with significantly less investment and existing infrastructure such as the Apple iTunes store. In a direct correlation, this shows that the Android market has grown at 1.5 times the speed of the Apple app store and at significantly less budgetary impact. This clearly demonstrates, again, the power of crowd accelerated innovation.
Links:
http://www.tipb.com/2011/04/19/apple-sold-187-million-ios-devices/
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_160_million_ios_devices_sold_so_far/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Market
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Market_share
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
Thanks Ranjini
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