The Open 100

The Open 100 competition allows you to nominate your top open companies/organizations/platforms in the world, celebrating the power of openness and mass collaboration. The competition was born out of the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) search for the world’s top 100 open innovation organizations. Now it is being opened up to you to find who the world’s best open innovators really are. You can nominate those companies you think are the best deserving to appear on the list of the best and most interesting open businesses at http://www.openbusiness.cc/category/directory/.

You might wonder what we actually mean what we mean by open organizations? While there is no clear-cut definition of ‘openness’ there is undeniably a trend to democratize and de-centralize previously closed business processes as the lines between consumers and producers blur. Increasingly companies are opening up their innovation and production processes. Some are formed from the start around communities as with Face, while others are opening up their intellectual property to share with others. This promises better, faster and more efficient innovation.

Roland Harwood of NESTA responded to the idea that open innovation is bandied around as a phrase too much, suggesting that the techniques will eventually just drop the word ‘open’ as it becomes more the norm. “It’s over-hyped and has been used and misused but the trends that underpin it are only going to increase. Open innovation is being prioritized at a senior level in organizations. Leaders like its promise of creating value quicker, cheaper, faster,” said Harwood to Businessweek. “But it’s the middle managers and heads of departments who have the responsibility for implementing this. They’re struggling for the right processes and business models and they don’t know where to start. That’s where the gap is. The strategic argument has been won; now it’s a pragmatic challenge.” The practice is always so much more difficult than the theory.

A month into the competition and there are a varied mixture of organizations and platforms nominated. Major telecommunications companies like BT, Nokia and Orange are nominated for their open innovation approach. Collaboratively made films like Faintheart, and El Cosmonauta as well as a Creative Commons based film production company, Riot Cinema Collective are also nominated. Household name web startups like Firefox, Twitter, Flickr, Google, Ebay and Facebook have been put forward as well as the smaller but equally important web services that focus on the environment like Akvo and Pachube.

International megabrands such as Lego, Virgin Atlantic, Tesco, IBM and Dell are also in the running with open innovation and openhardware communitites like Harkopen and Openp2pdesign.org. There are also 3 nominations for the band Nine Inch Nails for their pioneering transparent and co-created approach (nomination 1, 2, 3).

Nominated companies for ‘The Open 100’ can fall into the following categories:

Open Innovation│ Crowdsourcing │ Co-creation │ Open Source Software │Open Hardware│ Open Business (includes web 2.0)

And they will need to do some of the following…

∟ innovate products or services through communities

∟ share information for free using alternative ‘open copyright models’

∟ give substantial parts of a product or service away for free

∟ operate organizationally like open source software production, but translate the model to services

∟ lowering the costs of market entry by providing tools or services, that ‘open’ up traditional business boundaries

Public nomination will close on the 12th of February and the panel of judges will then choose the winner from each category. The panel of judges includes: Vic Keegan (technology correspondent Guardian), Marc Surman (director Mozilla Foundation), Roland Harwood (director Open Innovation at NESTA), David Simoes-Brown (head of Corporate Open Innovation at NESTA) and Andrew Gaule (found of the H-I Network and leader of the Network for Innovation and Strategic Growth). The winners will be announced on the 24th of February at the ‘Open 4 Business’ conference at NESTA and at openbusiness.cc. The winners will have the privilege of being published through NESTA and The Guardian Open Platform in the ultimate collection of open organizations; ‘The Open100’. Help celebrate the benefits of openness by nominating your favourite organizations or platforms at:

The Open 100

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