A few days ago Tesla Motors' CEO, Elon Musk announced: All Our Patents are Belong To You.
It is very natural thinking: balance the tremendous inflow of valuable in depth information that you cannot transform a fraction of into margins with a free outflow of great results we cannot transform into values alone? No doubt, open source software was one of the drivers of globalization. Open innovation is less radical, but still offer out licensing.
As a reviewer and evaluator of innovation projects of the European Commission I evaluated about 500 projects. All of them were performed by international partners and the consortium agreement controlling the exploitation and intellectual property rights were seen as important part of the project. They often complicated the project and I argued for a more liberal treatment of intellectual property rights. Technology leadership is nit defined by patents (says, Elon Musk) - I agree.
But I ask myself: Would I drive and open source car? I would definitely drive an open innovation car!
