To stay relevant in the ever-evolving world of technology, it is necessary to both reinvent and offer new enhancements. Thus, innovation is the heart of many technology companies. But innovation seldom springs full-grown. It has its own set of principles and helpers that lead to new thoughts and new directions.
In some ways, innovation isn’t all that hard. People come up with ideas all the time. Most big companies, and actually most small companies are incredibly efficient in delivering solutions. The risk, however, is in choosing the right idea to deliver. How many times have you seen A-class delivery on C–class ideas? (Of course, I’m sure you could also find examples in the opposite direction.)
So the trick of finding the best idea is dependent on both the problems set and the solution.
In many ways, open source has driven this new way of understanding both problem sets and solutions.
Over the years, the principles that can spur innovation are aligned with the same principles that power open source. Principles like shared vision, real-time status and updates, broadcast of requests and discussions and searchable archives that allow the capture and transfer of decisions and knowledge.
One of the risks to recognizing and delivering innovation in products and technologies within any company is, honestly, how things are viewed. All organizations choose a conceptual framework to define their objectives. It’s a cognitive choice similar to other choices you may make in organizing and parsing your world. You may find yourself in engineering centric, or design centric. Think of this as a single viewpoint. In empowering innovation and avoiding such tunnel vision, we can apply one of the cardinal rules of open source, albeit a bit mangled.
“Given enough eyeballs, all ideas are testable.”
(Based, of course, on Eric Raymond’s statement about bugs).
But eyeballs are not enough. We need to discuss and understand innovative ideas and approaches, and that leads us to another concept from open source. Just as open source development is best done “in the open”, so should discussions on innovation in technology and products. Providing such communication and allowing open discussion within bounds of civilized behavior allows the creation of new first-order values. One of the things I’ve learned in working with open source is that often the ideas spring from an interconnected though unrelated discussion thread. Providing that open communication leads to quick feedback and lets us learn from others. Too often in a closed environment it’s possible to fail to recognize new value simply because we aren’t looking for it. Innovation depends on recognizing those new values.
While we can relate certain principles in creation of innovation to open source open source actually goes a step farther. Open source enables the creation of innovation in concrete form. Do you have a great new concept? Odds are you don’t need to start from scratch to build a working implementation. Sometimes you may hear this as “standing on the shoulders of giants” but sometimes the new creation is a giant in its own right.
Over the past decade or more open-source has changed the way we develop code, whether a secure open source project or behind corporate firewalls. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that the same guiding principles of open source can lead us to a better, faster approach to creating and delivering innovative ideas.
