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A short reflection on open innovation and its impact in the business world

Toyota's recent response to claims of unintended acceleration in its vehicles illustrates the potential pitfalls of today's technologically complex automobiles. Software development, however, is still largely stuck in a 1970s pre-kaizen mode, where the human-readable instructions are accessible only to those who write the code. This protects the intellectual property of the software developer, but it also limits the abilities of others in the value chain to "see something, say something, and do something" to correct flaws. The lack of visibility into the software in its cars stands in stark contrast to the openness of its management and manufacturing processes. The software hidden in Toyota's black boxes is the equivalent to having a car with its hood welded shut. Open source represents the most significant change and most disruptive force in software development in 20 years. In the open-source software model, the human-readable source code is distributed along with the computer-readable machine code. Users are encouraged to understand the code, find flaws, suggest fixes, and add functionality. Open source is about leveraging the power of participation to solve complex problems such as manufacturing, health care, and government. It may also be how Toyota can improve its vehicles and ultimately regain consumer trust.

A short summary of Jeremy Rifkin's new book. An interesting perspective that we might consider meta-paradigmatic. In other words, the position is that changes we are observing in a number of fields (i.e. distributed energy generation and smart grids, social networking, open source innovation, etc.) are symptoms of a more radical change at societal level, from individualistic self-interest to collective "shared interest",from the pursuit of wealth and property rights to a broader concept of "quality of life". 

USB 3.0, a revolution? No, not really but it is a substantial improvement of the popular and indispensable interface that opens the door to a quick and easy management of large files in the home. It's a clear type of incremental innovation, and it's going to became the new connect standard for pcs and all the other devices. The competence enhancing content comes out from the compatibility properties with the current standard 2.0. The third generation of USB is promoted in performance even if the old 2.0, ten times slower in normal usage, have much to say to all those users, and the vast majority, who must manage large volumes of data .