The social network operating system

Today I attended the IBM Academy of Technology’s annual meeting and saw Prof. Barry Wellman’s keynote talk entitled “Networked: The New Social Operating System”. Wellman’s talk (based on his soon to be released book of the same title) was centred around pervasive social networks and their effect on society, culture and everyday life. In this post I am going to summarize some of Wellman’s talking points and add some of the thoughts I took away from the lecture.

A quick note on Barry – as you might have guessed based on his research, Prof. Wellman is well connected and posts a lot of interesting information and papers. Check out his website, or follow him on twitter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating new markets with open source

Blue Ocean authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review discussing market re-structuring based on strategic decisions. In this post I will discuss how their new ideas can be applied in an open source ecosystem to restructure the marketplace.

Background: What is blue ocean strategy?
Kim and Mauborgne identify two kinds of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are current markets. Competition exists and players must fight to carve out a share of the market in order to create value. Blue oceans on the other hand are undiscovered markets. Markets with no competition and low cost of entry. By looking for niches parallel to their current markets, organizations can discover blue oceans in order to create and capture a large share of a new market. Blue ocean strategy is based on a finance theory called endogenous growth. Endogenous growth theory states that strategies which promote innovation and openness will result in growth, and that organizations have the ability to change the market they operate in. Read the rest of this entry »

Business engagements with open source

Based on research being undertaken at Carleton University’s TIM program (of which I am a graduate) Peter Carbone (Nortel) and Tony Bailetti (Carleton) have developed a model of the open source engagements strategies organizations use. Broken into 5 types of interactions, Carbone & Bailetti break down the actions and benefits of each strategy. This type of work highlights the shifting maturity of open source users who now realize that open source can be used for much more than a shortcut to product release.

The Carbone/Bailetti interaction strategy model

The model is comprised of five interaction strategies. Appropriated value is increased as the number or projects interacted with increases. In latter stages value is created and captured based on the interactions with open source. (from http://www.slideshare.net/brianhurley/day-2-morning-open-source-carbone-and-weiss)

Read the rest of this entry »