Moving Beyond Open Innovation

"Opening up R&D organizations to outside ideas has become a powerful weapon in the strategic arsenal of research managers. As Henry Chesbrough writes, “[O]pen innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.” This strategy has been associated with notable commercial successes, such as Procter & Gamble’s SpinBrush, sourced not from internal R&D but rather a group of inventors in Cleveland." Read more from Moving Beyond Open Innovation

By AllOfUs

Democratizing Innovation

From MIT Press:

"Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.

The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive.

Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license."

Get this book for FREE from Google Books now

By AllOfUs

RFID chips to track pre-school children financed with federal funds?!

This is the best example of how the elite is seeing the new technology. Those who have power only see in the new technology ways to reinforce their position.of power. This is not just an accident! To get a federal grant one must go though a screening process. The project must be approved by the government. This horrible story points directly to the US federal government, who approved and financed the project. We can now legitimately ask ourselves if the US government is planning to enslave its own citizens. This is not so far-fetched after all, we are talking here about the same government who kidnaps non-american citizens in other countries to torture them and to keep them in secret prisons for an undetermined time, without access to the justice system. Allow me to remind you that the Obama administration has defended in court the abduction and torturing practices of the CIA implemented by the Bush administration.

THIS is UnbeLLLivvveble !  

By AllOfUs

Open Source engineering approach to build a car?

These people must be crazy! Haha, this is what people form GM and Ford must say. And this is exactly the reason why those dinosaurs will disappear in the near future. The economy will repopulate with economical entities like riversimple.

From riversimple's website:

Open source design and development. By licensing designs to an independent open source foundation, the 40 Fires Foundation, engineers and designers from around the world can help develop the vehicles and any manufacturer around the world can make them.

Have broader company ownership. The corporate structure of Riversimple is designed to ensure that all stakeholders in the enterprise have a voice in the governance of the business and share in the benefits of its success.

Go the riversimple homepage.

By AllOfUs

The Multitude Moon Project

Google and the XPrize are offering 30M$ to the first independent team that sends a robot on the Moon. Multitude Project created the Multitude Moon Project, a collaborative approach to solve this problem. 


The first goal of the Multitude Moon Project is to find the best solution. Not to build anything, but to look around and see if already existing technologies can be put together to solve the most important aspects of this challenging problem. For example, can we think of new efficient ways of propulsion? Do we have the technologies to put it together? Who would be the key contributors, who has these technologies. Is there something that needs to be improved and how? Can somebody simulate the proposed solution?   


Please take a look and join if you like the initiative. 

By AllOfUs

What's the best path towards a better world?

Every time I meet new people they ask me about the Multitude Project. After giving them updates about the movement and our activities they almost inevitably bring up the problem of social change. Is real change possible? Is it worth the fight? Is every system equally corruptible?

How to initiate real, positive social change? This question has followed me for years. I think I have an answer, and I would dearly like to get your opinion on it.

My solution is to offer people value, for themselves, their families, as well as for their communities. If the process through which they must go in order to acquire this value goes against the established order we have a wining formula for positive social change. 


More and more individuals and groups will be naturally drawn towards the new alternatives, simply because they constitute value for them. As the new order (established by a system of new alternatives) becomes increasingly populated, the old order gradually becomes abandoned. The weight of society gradually and naturally shifts from the old society to the new. This is what I call a CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION. There are many instances of such revolutions in human history, for example the Industrial Revolution. I contrast this with the type of radical and sudden change that characterized the Bolshevik Revolution, where one order was demolished first, to be replaced by a new, untested one. A constructive revolution is in essence a metamorphosis process. It is a gradual shift in human resources from an old set of processes to a new one, one that can provide more (hopefully in a more sustainable manner) for the same effort. 


At this moment, everyone involved in the multitude movement, either knowingly or not, is working hard to propose and to build alternatives that are based on a different paradigm, and which constitute a real source of value for every individual, and particularly for the creative and hard working ones among us. In more concrete terms, I am referring to those individuals who created and are involved in maintaining and improving the Internet; democratic and p2p infrastructures for communication, for massive collaboration and coordination; affordable tools for data analysis, automation, decision-making, etc. This includes these individuals who gave us Linux, Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Twitter, alternative currencies (see Cyclos), peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, the infrastructure for networks of local and sustainable food production and distribution, Connexion, personal energy production, value networks... 

These people embracing the values embedded within the Multitude Movement are not agitators driven by some abstract cause. They are working hard to provide people with whatever they need RIGHT NOW to insure their survival: education, affordable energy, new forms of transportation, of communication, etc. 

What I am proposing are new institutions! 

Human beings are malleable, they have a tremendous ability to adapt to changing conditions and circumstances. I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania and I spent my first 14 years witnessing first-hand how institutions change and how people change with them. Institutions reinforce social patterns and shape relations between individuals in society. 

People inherently respond to institutions by adaptation. The state may induce a nationalistic mentality and corporations induce a corporate mentality. An institution is not a building. It is a process by which a set of constraints and incentives shapes human relations and interactions, and forges culture. By changing these constraints/incentives people will also change, re-adapt to the new environment. The alternatives we propose help establish a different set of constraints/incentives. We hope that enough people will adopt them to become mainstream, thus changing our entire culture. There are enough individuals out there who are naturally compatible with the system we propose to spark the fire... In fact the fire is already burning and growing.


Are YOU involved in the creation, improvement, maintenance of democratic and popular systems which allow peer-to-peer exchange of any sort? Then YOU ARE PART OF THE MULTITUDE MOVEMENT. 

Please visit our homepage, you might find yourself at home there.

By t!b!

Internet 'Kill Switch' Proposed

The elite is waking up under the pressure of the multitude social movement. It's too late! The new technology had operated irreversible changes. These are desperate measures... The future is in the hands of the multitude, of you and I. 

From terrorism to cyber terrorism, they've always used fear to take your freedom away. We've seen this movie many time before.

By AllOfUs

The true spirit of the Multitude social movement

Well coordinated individuals can do better than governments! This action became viral, now spreading in other countries.

By AllOfUs

YouTube banned by Russian court

Court in Khabarovsk region orders internet provider Rosnet to lock YouTube over ultra-nationalist video. Read more here.

By AllOfUs

The myth of autonomy debunked, what about the myth of initiative?

photo by r8r
We've all been conditioned into believing that only a small percentage of all people are able to work autonomously. The machine/control paradigm of management is founded in this belief. In order to make people productive apparently you need to tell them what to do and how to do it.

Classical hierarchical organizations work that way. The executive sets up goals and directions, managers translate them into concrete directives and actions and pass them to their employees. Employees execute these orders. The employee is seen as a mechanical piece, part of a complex mechanical system. The machine metaphor is clearly apparent here. He/she needs to execute the given tasks within the imposed constraints. Yes, there is feedback going from the employee to the manager, and up to the executive, but there is very little autonomy.

It turns out that human organizations behave quite differently from mechanical automata, especially when creativity is the goal of the game. First, an organization needs to win the cooperation of it's members. A mechanical piece has no consciousness, no free will. You put it into its place within the system and it turns the way it is supposed to. A human being has the choice to do a great job, or a crappy job. In order to gain the full cooperation, organizations must satisfy for the individual some fundamental psychological and material needs. The individual needs to perceive that his/her contribution is important, that he/she is part of something bigger-a form of spirituality. The individual needs to perceive that he/she is respected, valued, appreciated. The individual must also believe that his/her contribution is justly rewarded, etc. etc. Second, it is now well understood that the working environment and all the psychological needs of the individual affect creativity in a major way. Even if you gain the full cooperation of your employees, you are still not sure that the creative juices are flowing to the optimal capacity.

Google understood all this! Among all the successful companies, their employees have the greatest autonomy. On Google's campus you find cafes, bars, swimming pools, game rooms, parks, you name it. You can take your laptop and work from the swimming pool, and your boss is not going to be there to pass you the sunscreen. Google understood that they can get more from their employees if they only emphasize on the job that has to get done, and let the employee decide how to do it. And it works! The myth of autonomy was debunked.

But there is another myth. We are told that the great majority of us have no initiative. If we are not given directions we don't know what to do. We might be autonomous, i.e. able to organize ourselves once we know what has to be done, but the majority of us are apparently incapable of setting goals and directions. What about Linux? Who tells developers which directions they should take? This myth is about to be debunked as well.

I am not advocating that all human beings are autonomous and show initiative. But what is the real percentage? The opposition to my argument brings up statistics, scientific studies made on our actual society, showing only a very small percentage of driven individuals with initiative. But wait a second! There is something scientifically wrong here, the method could be good, but the conclusions are false. The logic used is flawed. We are talking about what us humans are capable of, about our potential, we are NOT describing our actual society. We've seen that before. A scientific study on black slaves on a plantation in South Carolina USA, at the beginning of the century, would most probably reveal that the majority of these individuals were submissive and dependent. Can we conclude that it is in the nature of a black person to be submissive and dependent? Of course NOT! We know that humans are malleable. Put a child into slavery and he/she will adopt a slave mentality. It is a matter of adaptation! You don't comply you die! It is about adaptation, it is a force rather than a weakness. This shows the capacity of all humans to thrive in harsh situations. But once slavery was abolished these same people rapidly acquired the skills to live in society. They become teachers, business man, scientists, doctors, and even presidents.

Our actual system has made us dependent! Our masters only need us to produce, not to be autonomous, not to show too much initiative. We have bee conditioned into being docile and dependent. The scientific data describing individuals only describe the actual system, NOT the our potential.

What is the percentage of autonomous individuals with initiative, potentially speaking, within a culture of freedom and self-determination? If YOU are not a such person you may want be become one, YOU CAN. 

By AllOfUs