SocialTimes.com

The Test of a Good Product Posted: 19 Jun 2008 02:56 PM CDT Over the past few months I have had numerous entrepreneurs approach me to ask if I know of any good investors. Others haven’t approached me but I’ve read of their trouble finding funding. Today, a friend of mine, Nate Westheimer, announced that he will no longer be pursuing his own startup. I’m sorry to hear that but I’m glad that he is looking forward with optimism. Only recently did I speak with another entrepreneur who was making the same decision. Building a business is insanely challenging especially if it is in the internet industry. Personally, I’ve tried to develop countless startups. From a website called Frusic, which was the first social network that brought together musicians and fans to University Swap, which was a site that found the cheapest textbook on the web. I also tried things non-internet related including importing liquor from Brazil which was one of the most challenging companies I’ve started. I’ve also worked at a number of startups which each died slow deaths. Each died for their own reason but pretty much all of them died. At this point you may be thinking to yourself: well I know who not to hire when I’m trying to build my startup! Aside from the fact that the first 5 or 10 businesses I was involved in all failed, I’ve learned a ton from each of these failures. Entrepreneurs Can Become Excessively Attached One thing that I’ve also had the opportunity to observe over the past couple years is the attachment that entrepreneurs have with their businesses. This attachment can have numerous side effects. For the purpose of this article, the primary issue with this attachment is that an entrepreneur will frequently try to build something that just isn’t a good idea. When I say something isn’t a good idea, it means a lot of things including: it was the wrong timing for a product’s introduction, a poorly developed pitch or lack of access to the people that could make an idea work. Entrepreneurship involves a lot of luck and frequently it requires this magical mix of passionate and intelligent individuals combine with access to people that can spread an idea. Bad Ideas are Simply Bad Ideas Occasionally, I meet somebody that has a really horrendous idea and no matter how much marketing they put into it, it simply won’t work. Then again, nobody can tell you what really is a horrible idea but if you start hearing that your idea isn’t a great one from multiple people, you might want to question whether it’s worth following your current idea. That was like the liquor I was preparing to import. The reality was that it tasted like crap. Years later, nobody has been able to figure out an effective way to market the distilled sugar cane to consumers. No matter how much marketing you put into something, some ideas were meant to die. One thing that nobody can take away from true entrepreneurs is passion and persistence. No matter how many failures you have, you must make sure that you keep those two things. Most often, truly great ideas experience growth pretty early on. While it takes a variable amount of effort to get something off the ground, once you get something to launch, it should be able to gain traction with a little bit of effort. Good Ideas Experience Traction Early On The funny thing is that once your product or service starts gaining traction, you’ve only started. Enough of the rambling. What do I think the true test of a good product is? If you build a prototype, after a minor amount of adjusting, your product should be able to gain traction. If you find that it doesn’t gain traction after an extreme amount of effort, you might want to reconsider the future of your idea. One final thought. Just because knowing when to quit is extremely important for an entrepreneur, there are no exact rules. Sometimes one customer is all you need and that is enough “traction.” In the end, the entrepreneur is the only person who can decide. What do you think are good tests of a product or idea? Do you have rules for knowing when to quit?

App Developers Making $8,000 A Year Posted: 19 Jun 2008 12:02 PM CDT According to news posted on Techcruch, SocialMedia, the leading Facebook ad network, has paid out $8 million to developers over the past year. Divide that by the approximately 1,000 developers that are on their network and you get an average of $8,000 per developer. This isn’t a fair analysis though because revenue is clearly skewed toward those application with a higher number of active daily users. According to Jason Kincaid, “during a talk at the Web 2.0 conference last April, members of an expert panel were predicting total revenues on the Facebook platform of as little as $10M this year.” While that estimate has been underestimated, there is no sign that the number is going to be substantially higher. Then again it would be difficult to predict how much is actually being generated considering the numerous ways that applications are currently being monetized. There are virtual currencies and rewards programs that are generating revenue as well. The real questions about the revenue in this space are if this is sustainable and if it will continue to grow. Not even Facebook or MySpace have been able to generate massive revenues so it continues to be an industry wide issue. What creative solutions do you foresee for solving the monetization issue? Disclosure: SocialMedia is a sponsor of my sites.

Bebo Beefing With Facebook? Posted: 19 Jun 2008 10:37 AM CDT When Bebo lauched their platform last year, they made it insanely easy for developers to convert their Facebook applications over. That may have been a bad idea. Facebook’s upcoming update next month is going to substantially change the integration process for developers. Rather than being a breeze to transfer applications, it’s now going to become a little more challenging. According to Alley Insider, Bebo’s head of platform engineering is concerned. Steve’s worried that Facebook's upcoming redesign, the one that's going to limit the spread of new apps, will also make it more difficult to move new Facebook apps to Bebo. So the network has to decide whether it’s going to change its own platform, yet again, to match Facebook’s. If Bebo doesn’t, Cohen says, it'll lose out: “Facebook really threw a monkey wrench in the whole compatibility thing….If we're not compatible with Facebook, no one is going to develop for our platform.” Additionally, it appears that the head of platform engineering isn’t as concerned about OpenSocial. He’s convinced that the Facebook platform is still the platform that matters. Looks like Bebo is going to be facing some difficult decisions in the coming months. Also, I can’t imagine that Facebook is too concerned about this issue. Ultimately, Facebook and Bebo are technically competitors.

Developers Give Twitter the Boot Posted: 19 Jun 2008 09:55 AM CDT I gotta be honest. For the past couple weeks I’ve been using Plurk a ton. The initial reason was downtime from Twitter but it increasingly became about the much more active community. Then today I read about developers bailing on Twitter because of their unreliable API. That’s a big problem but then again not even Plurk has a functioning API. The reality is that developing a micro-blogging platform is a lot more difficult then anyone anticipated as far as I can tell. Twitter has throttled API access, making it extremely difficult for any developer to build a reliable application on top of the service. A couple months ago, I launched an internal directory for this site but the Twitter API slowed down the service significantly. While I’ve since figured out a workaround (which has yet to be implemented), having to develop a workaround due to an unreliable API just doesn’t seem like the right solution. Some seem to think that Twitter is going to die thanks to their failing API. While I’ve been using the service less frequently, many of my contacts are still using the service regularly to stay updated with what’s going on in the digital community. Many more are confused with which service to use and have instead decided to use all of them by taking advantage of the Ping.fm service which updates your status across all your networks. Whatever the solution is, something has to give in the world of status updates and micro-blogging in general. For some reason I seriously doubt that this will mean the death of Twitter. Have you started using other services as well or are you still a faithful Twitter user?

The Global Battle for Social Network Domination Posted: 19 Jun 2008 09:25 AM CDT While domestic shifts in social network usage have helped fuel the growth of a select group of social networks, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the real opportunity for expansion of reach is abroad. Last night Eric Eldon illustrated that Friendster, the long forgotten social network which helped fuel domestic social network addiction, could become the largest social network globally thanks to growth in Asia. In Europe there is another battle taking place. According to Caroline McCarthy, “Facebook’s still a long-shot second place in French social networking, according to the metrics. Skyrock, a site almost completely unknown in the U.S., pulled in 11.5 million unique visitors in April 2008 compared to Facebook’s 3.2.” It’s not all bad news for Facebook though as they grew a whopping 2,877 percent in France year-over-year. It’s clear that there is a massive race underway to snap up as many users as possible because ultimately once you have a user and all their friends, there is a substantially decreased likelihood of that user shifting to a new social network. That would also explain Facebook’s emphasis on friend recommendations. As the social networks play there own technical battles over opening up and building the most developer friendly platforms, there is still a race just to obtain users. It’s clear that there is still no official winner and there won’t be one for some time. Who has all of your friends and who do you think will end up winning?

Top Social Network Age Distributions Posted: 19 Jun 2008 08:08 AM CDT Rapleaf, a company which regularly produces studies on social networks, has released a new one about the age distribution of users on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and LinkedIn. Here are some highlights of that study: - 120 million social network profiles (total) were found, with each person averaging 2-3 social networks - Women and the 14-24 year old demographic are more likely to use Myspace and Facebook than other demographics (the 14-24 year old demographic represents 65.5% and 66.25% of total users respectively) - Men and the 25-34 year old demographic are more likely to use LinkedIn and Flickr than other demographics (the 25-34 year old demographic represents 51.0% and 38.1% of total users respectively) It’s interesting to see that the age distributions are all heavily skewed toward a younger demographic. LinkedIn has the oldest demographic overall but the most popular age group is those members between the ages of 25 and 34.

MySpace Releases New Developer Tools Posted: 18 Jun 2008 11:30 PM CDT Over the past couple days, MySpace has been communicating with developers about a couple of issues. The first issue was the creation of a new tool that enables developers to run Flash files within applications. Rather than hosting the files on their own servers, developers must upload flash files to MySpace’s servers using the form pictured below: This new model provides developers with script access while still protecting MySpace from harmful external scripts. Check out the MySpace post for more details. The second announcement made by MySpace is the introduction of an oAuth Tool which assists developers in constructing properly formatted query strings. The new oAuth tool “allows developers to generate a Base string and a Signature along with request querystring, so that they can compare what a valid request looks like to what they’re own servers are producing for server-to-server RESTful API calls.” I’m sure that this tool will help resolve confusion for many of the developers that were facing challenges with creating proper HTTP requests. A screen shot of the new tool is displayed below. If you’d like to learn more about the updates, go check out the MySpace developer blogs.

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Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Deal radar 2008: Veoh Posted: 19 Jun 2008 12:09 PM CDT San Diego-based Veoh is an internet television service where users can find and watch major studio content, independent productions and other user generated videos. Founded in 2003 by Dmitry Shapiro, who is also the company's Chief Innovation officer, Veoh began its full beta service in early 2006.

Infineon: The Qimonda Challenge Posted: 19 Jun 2008 11:56 AM CDT In the last part of this series, we looked at Infineon's recent financials and pointed out that Qimonda is a key reason why the company is struggling to create more shareholders' value. Let us now take a deeper look into Qimonda's challenges and Infineon's strategic initiatives to address the situation.

Where is Adobe Going vis-à-vis Apple? Posted: 19 Jun 2008 11:40 AM CDT Adobe has been around for more than 25 years now and a significant part of that period is marked by its successful symbiotic relationship with Apple. However, over the past few years, this relationship has turned sour with their products competing with each other (e.g. Final Cut and Aperture from Apple).

Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 4) Posted: 19 Jun 2008 01:59 AM CDT SM: How do you make your recommendation software portable to mass utilization? FM: We have been working on something we call "Business Solutions". The objective is to provide the recommender as a service for third parties. They can easily get recommendations integrated into their websites by utilizing our hosted platform. This is very cost effective.

Acyut: Humanoid at BITS Pilani Posted: 18 Jun 2008 10:28 PM CDT Yesterday, I met Samay, one of the proud parents of Acyut, the humanoid robot at BITS. Samay, Arpit and their team members are in the Bay Area to participate in the robogames in San Francisco.

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SocialTimes.com

YouTube Launching Long-Form Video Posted: 18 Jun 2008 12:52 PM CDT Michael Learmonth at AlleyInsider has the scoop about YouTube adding long-form video to their site. Apparently the company has decided that 10-minute videos were simply not enough among increasing competition from sites like Hulu which are providing entire episodes of television shows. Here’s what Michael Learmonth had to say: YouTube’s 10-minute limit has served a couple of purposes to date: It keeps bandwidth costs down, and it makes it harder for copyright owners to complain about unauthorized streams: Technically, you could cut up “300″ into 10-minute chunks and distribute it through the site (and we assume some people have). But who wants to watch that? And short clips also work for YouTube because, well, it’s the Web, and there’s a limited appetite for anything that lingers on for more than a couple of minutes. So what’s Google thinking about here? One obvious answer: Advertising. YouTube sells ads against videos uploaded by its content partners, but there are only so many ads you can sell against a short, under clip. Presumably YouTube wants to figure out if it can sell more of them against longer clips.

Changes to the Social Times Posted: 18 Jun 2008 11:07 AM CDT Everyday I read through hundreds if not thousands of articles trying to figure out what is important to display on this blog as well as AllFacebook. I end up with easily 30 or more tabs opened in two of my browsers and occasionally I decide to post about an article that I feel is particularly compelling. There is a problem with this system though: the inherent lack of information dissemination. If The Social Times really is the supposed to cover everything that’s social on the web (whether social media or social networks), we aren’t doing our job well enough. While I aim to get up 8 articles a day across my two sites, I occasionally miss a few or don’t have time to write a substantially insightful piece. That doesn’t mean that I’m not reading about the issues, it just means I don’t have enough time to put together all of my thoughts. As such I am going to start experimenting with a different style. While I’ll continue to post the same number of editorial pieces as usual, I’d like to also include summaries of other articles covering issues that I simply don’t have time to write about. This way, the readers can stay up to date with what’s going on and still have my take on what it all means. If the amount of content is overwhelming, I will be providing a weekly newsletter with only the editorial content and links to all of the news items. Go subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll begin receiving it in the coming weeks. I will also soon provide a daily newsletter which highlights the most important content and occasionally additional information which isn’t included on this site. My goal is to provide as thorough coverage as possible of this space and simply limiting it to “Nick O’Neill’s opinion” is simply not sufficient. I am going to try out this new model and see how it works. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions, please let me know because I want to do what’s best for the readers.

New York Times Goes Social With TimesPeople Posted: 18 Jun 2008 10:08 AM CDT Caroline McCarthy just posted about a new Firefox plugin which the New York Times launched today. The service enables users to share the articles that they’ve been reading with other friends. The articles you read show up in a newsfeed-like manner comparable to Facebook’s newsfeed or your dugg articles on social news site, Digg. The tool identifies users via their browser, not via their normal user login. To find your friends, you can simply search by name and location. The functionality is nearly identical to Google’s shared feed items tool found in Google Reader. The only difference is that the shared items only work for New York Times articles. I gave the tool a test run on my newly updated Firefox browser and it worked smoothly. The only problem was that the toolbar which sits at the top of the page and is supposed to show “Recent Activity” didn’t display any of my recently shared items. That appears to be the only bug but aside from that, everything worked well. I think the concept makes a lot of sense but I’m not sure that I’d ever use this tool again. Ultimately I consume the majority of my content through RSS feeds and sharing that content in other locations doesn’t make a lot of sense. Then again, I could import my New York Times shared feed directly into FriendFeed and now all of my shared New York Times articles will be seen by all my digital friends. It’s nice to see the New York Times adding more social features but adding other contacts from this tool doesn’t make a lot of sense. This tool is yet another place for me to manage part of my digital identity and honestly I’m tired of doing that from other places on the web. Would you use this tool or do you already have enough places to share your favorite content? People Search Screenshot Shared Feed Screenshot

Death of the Personal Homepage Posted: 18 Jun 2008 08:30 AM CDT As far back as I can remember, it has been a “cool” thing to have your own personal homepage. A site where anybody can drop by and get to know a little more about you. At one point having your own personal website was a unique thing but eventually the novelty wore off. While it’s still important to have a place where people can go to learn about you, filling your site with “widgets” and other random trinkets is more about self expression instead of providing valuable insight into your personality. Fred Wilson thinks that “we need to move to a model where the content is all in the same flow.” He uses Tumblr as an example but the first thing that popped into my head was FriendFeed. The reality is that most peoples’ blogs and personal websites are only interesting to their family and close friends and that’s the extent of it. Recently though, sites like Facebook have made it easier to connect and keep people up to date without the thoughts expressed through a personal journal. Snippets of our thought processes pop-up on our friends’ home pages thanks to status updates. That’s ultimately all we want to know when it comes to written content from most of our connections. For instance, most of my friends don’t read any of my blogs even though I have thousands of blog posts. They simply want to see the pictures of things I’ve been up to and information about my recent activities. It’s the voyeur in all of us but most of us will never go so far as to reading every single article that our friends’ have written. I believe that self expression is important but I’m not so sure that it needs to come in the form of an incredible looking website. We can share our creativity through images whether they are photographs or paintings. We can also express our creativity through the music we create, listen to and share. Personal web pages have been about creativity and self expression but they haven’t been as focused on connecting and ultimately connecting is the most powerful component of the internet. While widgets enable creativity and personal expression I think that there are already plenty of tools that enable creative expression. It’s more about connecting that expression through a continuous stream of content. As such, I think the average person no longer needs a “personal homepage” which exists on a separate domain. If you are really in need of a domain name, throw a CNAME on it and have it display your FriendFeed. While this is somewhat of a tangent from Fred Wilson’s suggestion that we need to move past widgets, I think it means the same thing. Ultimately we are moving beyond the standard personal homepage and moving toward streams of our digital identity. Do you think there is still a need for a “personal homepage”?

AP Puts Up Ridiculous Blogger Toll Booth Posted: 18 Jun 2008 07:00 AM CDT Yesterday the AP wrote about the new LinkedIn valuation: It’s one of the richest appraisals for a Silicon Valley startup since Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook Inc. late last year. That deal valued Palo Alto-based Facebook and its online hangout at $15 billion. The Facebook financing in turn helped several other startups that promote online socializing to promote themselves. Ning Inc. and Slide Inc. wrangled implied valuations ranging between $500 million and $560 million when investors poured more money into them earlier this year, while RockYou was valued between $200 million and $300 million in a deal completed last week. That quote should have cost $25. Hope you enjoyed it! The new policy set forth by the Associated Press is that bloggers should pay to quote their articles. If I had a $15 for every time I was quoted I’d be doing pretty well. Unfortunately nobody would quote me at that point. That’s the same thing that will happen to the Associated Press who will be meeting with the head of the Media Bloggers Association on Thursday according to Tim Conneally of the BetaNews. While policing for continuous misuse of content is a similar strategy used by leaders in the music industry, attacking individual bloggers one at a time will fail miserably. Then again, paraphrasing articles is just as easy and makes linking back to paraphrased articles unnecessary. Do you think the new strategy being used by the Associated press will work? Screenshot of the AP Toll Both … Perhaps I should have paid for lifting a screenshot

LinkedIn Gets Its Billion Dollar Valuation Posted: 17 Jun 2008 09:44 PM CDT LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures giving the company a $1 billion valuation. The company has experienced massive growth over the past year. 319 percent to be exact according to statistics released in April. While the company is a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company has an extremely targeted user base with high average household incomes and a higher median age then most of the large social networks. A good analogy would be that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal of social networks. There’s no clear path for LinkedIn from here but there is a lot of buzz surrounding their soon to be released platform which is expected to attract the attention of premium brands. LinkedIn has now raised a total of $80 million. Don’t expect them to start selling virtual goods anytime soon though. LinkedIn appears to be focused on building out their rapidly expanding user base. There had been substantial speculation that the company would get acquired by News Corp to integrate into the Wall Street Journal. Based on the recent round of financing any partnership between the two companies will most likely be delayed. The social networking space continues to heat up with new rounds of financing by the industry leaders. It will be interesting to see how this all transforms over the next 6 to 12 months as the focus shifts to cross-platform communication and integration. Oh and lets not forget monetization.

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Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Deal radar 2008: Motionbox Posted: 18 Jun 2008 12:27 PM CDT Motionbox is an online video sharing service based in New York City. The brainchild of Chris O' Brien and Andrew Wason, MotionBox was dubbed a Youtube clone. It seems to have some interesting features though, and may be a reasonably priced acquisition for a larger player with distribution looking for an online video angle.

Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 3) Posted: 18 Jun 2008 01:59 AM CDT SM: Had you already built an initial version of the software by the time you received your first round of funding? FM: At that point and time we had launched our first version of Recommender as an online service. We separated the Recommender engine from the final product since the very beginning. However, the best way to show off the Recommender is to tie it together with a consumer facing product. We built the music recommendation tools as a capability demonstration.

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Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Cadence Takes a Page Out of Microsoft’s PlayBook Posted: 17 Jun 2008 12:22 PM CDT With the Microsoft-Yahoo! drama fresh on everyone’s mind, Mike Fister and the Cadence Board has finally DONE something that shows a bit of boldness, some imagination, and possibly some courage, even. Cadence has made a hostile takeover bid for Mentor Graphics.

Deal Radar 2008: Blurb Posted: 17 Jun 2008 11:48 AM CDT Blurb gives individuals and groups the ability to create, publish and market professional quality photo books. Unlike offset printing, they can publish just one copy or thousands, bringing book publishing to the masses. The self-publishing and print-on-demand industry is starting to become a meaningful alternative to the older, slower, more traditional publishing model.

Nokia In Light of the 3G iPhone Posted: 17 Jun 2008 11:32 AM CDT In a recent post on the impact of 3G iPhone on RIM, we saw how RIM and Nokia stand to gain from the iPhone momentum in the smartphone industry. In April, Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia, talked about a new touch-screen mobile phone that is supposed to take on the iPhone. Called the Tube, it will support Java and is most likely to have a keyboard, GPS, and run on the Symbian S60 platform. In October 2007, Nokia developed a touch screen version of the OS that will support finger and stylus input as well as tactile feedback.

Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 2) Posted: 17 Jun 2008 01:55 AM CDT SM: Did you cash out and make a clean break from Intelligent Software Components? FM: Yes. Part of the deal with Banco Santander was the partial purchase of shareholder equity. I cashed out and took sabbatical leave in September of 2002. In February of 2003 I moved to Oregon. I met a professional in Oregon who is an expert in Machine Learning, Tom Dietterich. I went to work with him trying to learn more things and I also worked for DARPA for a while. I was trying to do things with DNA as well as add a few new layers onto the Internet including the Knowledge Plain to better understand what is going on with the Internet. This was the basis for the self healing capabilities of the internet.

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Broadcast Search

A broadcast search is issued by a network node because a directed search using database information has failed or there is no database information for the requested resource. A broadcast search does not use database information about the location of a requested LU to propagate the search. Instead, a broadcast search is sent to every adjacent network node at the same time. Each of the adjacent network nodes then forwards the broadcast search to all other adjacent network nodes, and so forth. After propagating a broadcast search to all adjacent network nodes, each network node also searches all its client end nodes to determine if the target LU resides within the domain of the network node.
This process allows the entire network to be searched. When the search reaches the network node serving the destination resource, that node sends back a positive reply to the first search request it receives.
In Figure 1, LUA on ENA wants to start a session with LUB on ENB.
Figure 1. Broadcast search - stage 1










ENA sends a directed search to its network node server (NN1). Because the directory database of NN1 has no information about LUB, NN1 sends a network broadcast search to all end nodes served by NN1. If LUB is not located in the NN1 local domain, the broadcast search is propagated at the same time to all adjacent network nodes.
After propagating the broadcast search, network nodes search local node and served end nodes.


Figure 2. Broadcast search - propagating to served end nodes












Since LUB is located in ENB, ENB sends a positive reply to the broadcast search request. The reply is returned along the same path as the request. The directory database in NN4 and NN1 is updated with the information about the locations of both LUB and LUA.

The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving

Karim R. Lakhani
Lars Bo Jeppesen
Peter A. Lohse
Jill A. Panetta

Copyright © 2007 by Karim R. Lakhani, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse and Jill A. Panetta


Openness and unrestricted information sharing amongst scientists have been identified as
institutional norms that are critical to scientific progress [1] and the key distinguishing
features that separate the scientific community from other spheres of activity [2].
However, empirical studies of the behavior of scientists have shown that career [3],
publication priority [4], intellectual property and financial concerns [5,6] often trump
openness to the potential detriment of overall scientific advancement. For example, 47
per cent of academic geneticists who asked other researchers for additional information
or materials regarding published research reported that at least one of their requests had
been denied in the preceding three years [5]. Another study showed that only 14 per cent
of experimental biologists were willing to talk openly about their current research with
other colleagues [7]. The result of this lack of openness is that scientific problem solving
activity is constrained and fails to adequately leverage the larger accumulation of
knowledge amongst the wider scientific community.
More recently, free and open source software communities have demonstrated that
actually practicing the norms of openness and information sharing in a peer-production
setting can result in the creation of complex technological products that approach, and
sometimes rival, the scope and quality of similar products produced by proprietary efforts
[8,9]. The robustness of open information sharing and collective production has been
demonstrated in fields as diverse as the creation of encyclopedia entries on sciencerelated
topics [10], bioinformatics [11] and cultural products [12]. These initiatives have
shown that openness and collaboration before, during, and after problem solving efforts
can harness the knowledge of many towards creating unique solutions.
4
Here we show that the opening up of information about difficult and unsolved scientific
problems to a large group of unknown “outsiders” can be an effective problem solving
strategy. Most problem solvers extensively use prior experience and knowledge in their
attempts at solving problems, resulting in a “local search” of the potential solution space
[13,14]. Opening up the search process and broadcasting problem information to
outsiders can alleviate the negative effects of local search. We call this problem solving
approach “broadcast search.” The premise of broadcast search is the central insight that
knowledge is unequally and widely distributed in society [15] and that the locus of
innovation and problem solving shifts to where knowledge is stickiest (i.e. difficult to
access or move)[16].
Our study finds that the broadcast of problem information to outside scientists results in a
29.5% resolution rate for scientific problems that had previously remained unsolved
inside the R & D laboratories of well-known science-driven firms. Problem solving
success was associated with the ability to attract specialized scientists with diverse
scientific interests. Furthermore, successful solvers created solutions to problems that
were on the boundary or outside of their fields of expertise, showing that openness in
science can trigger the transfer and transformation of knowledge from one scientific field
to other. We also found that solvers mainly relied on information from previously
developed solutions when attempting to solve broadcast problems, indicating a relatively
efficient knowledge transfer mechanism. Finally, successful solvers were motivated to
engage in problem solving effort by either intrinsic motivations or financial reward.

Read more @ http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf