First steps of Open Business Spain

Last May 2nd, people of the project Open Business Spain meet for first time in Barcelona. Francisco Vargas, Ramón Sangüesa, Julen Iturbe and me were there. In that ocassion Oriol Lloret could not be able to be with us. All the four we constitute the core grouo trying to develop the project initially in Spain and finally in the Spanish-speaking community.

The project is organised around a wiki (that will be moved soon to other platform, to get better functionality and to use a free software platform, more coherent with our open philosophy). The report of the meeting is available as Google Doc both in Spanish and English. Of course, as the very idea of open business, the report is a document in construction, but we decided to share it to get feedback and discussion.

In different posts, Francisco Vargas, Ramón Sangüesa, Julen Iturbe and myself have reported the meeting. Here, using the “open” concept, I will remix these previous posts to report the meeting to our English-speaking community (a previous Spanish version was published some days ago).

At the meeting we defined a plan for future (immediate) work with three main goals:

To develop a concept of the Open Business (OB) model. To identify the basic elements composing the model, being characterised as in construction and flexible. The OB concept is, in our opinion, a continuum of options more than a well established unified paradigm completely defined in all its components.
To spread theory and cases of OB through our wiki, this Open Business blog and our own individual blogs.
To work with entrepreneurs combining training and action. From our point of view an essential element of our work will be to develop the OB concept in practical projects. In this sense, there are two potential fields of activity (actually, two extremes of a continuum of possibilities): a) “disorganise” big corporations to start a process of transformation in OB kernels or platforms (moving from traditional organisations to open networks), or b) work with entrepreneurs and start-ups to make them use efficiently the opportunities offered by the OB paradigm. From these two options, we prefer initially to concentrate in the second one, because probably we could get a more direct and large impact in the short and medium term. In any case we will try to develop both fields in the future.

We have no detailed plans with great goals; we will try to develop the projects on the run learning with the practice. We (in Spain and everywhere) are starting to build a “new cartography” (composed of concepts, methods and cases) that will be completed as a emergent property of our own work thinking, writing and sharing. Starting from that goal, we will, first, evangelize and train and, as soon as possible, develop projects. And, of course, this is a continuous process where we should learn and redefine concepts and ideas continuously.

In our first meeting, and although we are definitely oriented to practical activities as final goals, we devoted a long time to discuss the Open Business concept and to start to remix the different ideas moving around this, at least until now, diffuse concept (that in some fields has become like the trademark of professor H. Chesbrough, a useful concept although too restricted considering the reality and potential of open business).

OB incorporates more specific processes and topics as business 2.0 or open innovation (both could be related in most,, but not in all, cases). The concepts of OB and Open Innovation (OI) have arrived in the last two decades following two tracks: from the corporate world and from the communities of interest. Taking into account these two parallel developments, we have identified different origins that are converging (or they will converge in the near future) in a new OB paradigm:

Models of “open innovation” from the traditional business schools, lead by the research of H. Chesbrough. These models are born from the analysis of the innovative processes in large corporations, mostly from the USA. In their first development, these models are close to the crowdsourcing. Later, this research identified the organizative implications of OI, presenting an OB concept in his last book or in this paper in the MIT Sloan Management Review: Why Companies Should Have Open Business Models.
Ideas born in communities “open source“, their models and work practices (that inspirate the own Open Business project). Eric Von Hippel (and its collaborators at MIT and other research centers) have developed the concept of “user innovation” from the analysis of communities devoted to free software, adventure and risk sports (as wind-surfing and others) or the strategies of traditional corporations as 3M. In a second phase, from the idea of “user innovation” they arrive to the concept (and book) of “Democratising innovation“, very close to OB. Other important ideas in this field come from Yochai Benkler and their work about The Wealth of Networks.
The conceptual framework of complex systems and chaos, and specially the new science of networks born from this broad field.
The ideas and practices developed from organisations structureless and leaderless.

And, of course, as we declared previously, this is a completely open project permanently in beta, including objectives, methods and its geographical development (in fact, we would like to include in the future people from Latin America).