Of Open Source and Open Innovation

Last week I wrote about a talk I gave with the title “Innovation inducement prizes as a possible mechanism to unlock the benefits of open innovation models”. I explored the idea of inducement prizes then, and now I'd like to look at open innovation.

That concept rose to prominence with Henry Chesbrough's book, “Open Innovation - The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”, published in 2003. It's a decent enough exploration of the idea from a business viewpoint, but what shocked me when I read it was that Linux is mentioned just once, on page 106, in the context of IBM, which was “able to create value for its customers through its embrace of open standards in a variety of areas, including the Linux operating system, the Java programming language, and the aforementioned HTML and http protocols.”

That's all true, but it misses the key point: that open innovation, as described throughout Chesbrough's book, was essentially invented by Linus when he started the Linux project in 1991. To see why, we need to look at the larger history of free software.