I recently tweeted that I love working at a big consumer facing company. I’ve been lucky in that in many of the places I’ve worked I’ve been able to interact directly with the people using what I’ve produced, but at the same time I feel that I’ve been unlucky in that I haven’t always been able to receive when they’ve wanted to reciprocate.
In my presentation series over the last few years a key recurrent theme has been what’s sometimes called “the gift economy” (and I recommend Tor Nørretranders’ excellent book The Generous Man on the subject). What we usually refer to as business, “the gold economy”, is only part of all the ways humans interact, and keep track of the value of those interactions.
Another part of my message has been the evolution of interaction from static, to search, to social. It’s very obvious that social is part of the gift economy, and vice versa. The concept of social currency captures this pretty accurately.
It’s not enough interacting one-way with everyone around you, your company and the products you create. As Eric von Hippel has shown, innovation tends to happen outside of your chosen four walls. That’s true also for the reputation based economy, the social currency, where the value of something kept behind closed doors would be less than if it’s made public. The observation of interest here being that this is true not only for things, but for the persons involved in creating those things as well.
The value of your employees increase the more they’re able to interact with everyone else. When their ideas are made visible they’re vetted and the social currency of both the employees and the ideas themselves are made part of the global knowledge economy. The alternative is for your employees and ideas to wither behind an iron curtain, unable to openly compete on equal terms.
I suggest porous companies, those that let ideas and their proponents be part of something bigger, are not only able to make better use of global knowledge but also to offer a more attractive workplace. Open Innovation is thus not only a buzzword affecting the way you do product development, but also part of the cost & benefits package you offer your employees.
When you have your next incredible idea, you’re going to talk to people whom you know do great stuff. If the great stuff I’ve done is locked inside a filing cabinet with our legal department, that won’t be me.