Participle

Last week I was in Tokyo, exploring how we could develop the cuusoo.com Open Innovation platform here in the UK, for the creation of new public services (not for the design of products, its use in Japan). The system is currently in Japanese, but if you can manage it, have a go at designing your own product, then create and manage your own market for selling it. It’s a very powerful system, seen as an energising resource for the Japanese manufacturing industry, which is very similar in structure to the Italian model - comprising over 5 millions manufacturers, with the most common size of company just 5 people. I’ll post more about this system later.

But, I left the UK in turmoil. The country was struggling. Yes, the population was dramatically split. On the one hand, we have those that believe Leona Lewis’ version of ’Run‘ is better than the original. On the other, those that remember the 2007 V festival, with Snow Patrol in full swing, as a complete high point of their life.  I, myself, was eagerly awaiting Leona’s version’s entry into the charts, because really, if it reached higher than number 5 (which was the highest the original reached), then we’ve got some data to work with. While I was away, a record company error meant it failed to make it into the charts at all last week, but we’ve still got some data to work with.  Readers of The Sun reckon it would have walked into the number one slot, and on iTunes in the UK and in Ireland, the song reached number one in minutes. In fact, the BBC reported yesterday that the track has become the fastest-selling digital-only track in the UK. In terms of numbers, I think that means Leona has it, sorry NME.

The result, and Leona herself, have open innovation written all over. (Not least because of the lyrics of the song - Light up, light up, as if you have a choice.) Leona was voted to success by winning a UK TV show, the X Factor, which this year is enjoying weekly ratings in excess of 12m viewers (that’s roughly 1 in every 6 people in the UK), several million of whom vote for their favourite singer by telephone every week, week after week. Leona Lewis is one of us, the people, an East London girl who worked as a receptionist before going to her X-Factor audition.

In my studying of Open Innovation systems, the most comprehensive list of activities I have found is here. I don’t find the catagorisation very useful. I prefer those that are broken down as follows: Mass Problem Solving (ie. Innocentive, in fact the vast majority of them listed), Mass Customisation (ie. My Starbucks, Lego Factory), Mass Customer Insights (ie. some of the early Proctor and Gamble systems, Muji) and Mass New Market Creation (ie. Cuusoo, Etsy, Threadless). If you have a better list of catagorisation, please let me know.

Back to Leona and the X-Factor, not only did we participate in ‘Mass Problem Solving’ voting her to win, and receive a US$1.5m record deal, but we also ‘Mass Customised’ her success, her version of ‘Run’ was never planned for album or single release, but following Radio 1’s broadcasting of it, demand hit the roof, and the track was rapidly shoe-horned into a new ‘deluxe version’ of her latest album and released as a downloaded single.

Snow Patrol, by contrast, followed the traditional band success route. They met at university (largely still the domain of the middle class), got a record deal in Glasgow, worked the gig circuit, and finally, their talent won out through CD sales and the festival circuit. It’s an old-skool type rise to fame, boosted by ‘those in the know’, starting with a record company A&R person finding them. NME helped out, too. But, it’s the traditional route, albeit largely down to luck, being in the right place at the right time, and having talent too. Leona has talent, let’s not say that her success is solely down to us, her voice, by any standard is outstanding, and her success outside the UK is testament to that.

So, back to ‘Open Innovation.’ The web based communities can only dream of the numbers displayed on TV, 12m+ viewers of The X Factor, every week in the UK, 50m+ viewers of American Idol in the US. If our interaction with the X-Factor was translated into web based interactions (just go with me here), we would have a website that would have 48 million visitors per month, which would most likely translate into 250 million page views a month, the equivalent of a website receiving a billion hits.

I know, I know, its boring to compare the TV with the internet, and boring to compare the entertainment industry to more ‘serious’ industries such as manufacturing, commerce, business and public services. I also know it is strange to try and compare the data between The X-Factor and, say Innocentive, but here’s my beef - If we are talking about ‘open innovation’ systems being ‘open’, particularly when we are talking about developing a system in public services, then we must reach as wide an audience as possible. If not, we’re not ‘open’, and we might as well re-think this in terms of ‘A-tiny-little-bit-open Innovation.’

So, help me out, here. I have 4 questions:

1) How can these ‘open innovation’ system reach as wide an audience as TV?
2) What can ‘open innovation’ in earnest sectors learn from the successes of the ‘open innovation’ entertainment business (politics seems to have managed it, no?)?
3) Where are the business models that actually work in ‘open innovation’?
4) Generally, please, tell me, where is the data to support the term ‘open’?