Four principles for the open world Don Tapscott

openness it’s a word that denotes

opportunity and possibilities open-ended

open harsh open source open door policy

open bar and everywhere the world is

opening up and it’s a good thing why is

this happening the technology revolution

is opening the world

yesterday’s internet was a platform for

the presentation of content the Internet

of today is a platform for computation

the Internet is becoming a giant global

computer and every time you go on at you

upload a video you do a Google search

you remix something you’re programming

this big global computer that we all

share humanity is building a machine and

this enables us to collaborate in new

ways collaboration can occur on an

astronomical basis now a new generation

is opening up the world as well I

started studying kids about 15 years ago

it’s actually 20 years ago now and I

notice how my own children were

effortlessly able to use all the

sophisticated technology and at first I

thought my children are prodigies and

but then I notice all the friends were

like them so that was a bad theory so I

started working with a few hundred kids

and I came to the conclusion that this

is the first generation to come of age

in the digital age to be bathed in bits

I called them the net generation I said

these kids are different they have no

fear of technology because it’s not

there it’s like the air sort of like I

have no fear of a refrigerator and yeah

there’s no more powerful force to change

every institution than the first

generation of digital natives I’m a

digital immigrant I had to learn the

language the global economic crisis is

opening up the world as well are opaque

institutions from the Industrial Age

everything from old models of the

corporation government media Wall Street

are in various stages of being stalled

or frozen or an atrophy or even failing

and this is now creating a burning

platform in the world I mean think about

Wall Street the core modus operandi of

Wall Street almost brought down global

capitalism now you know the idea of a

burning platform that you’re somewhere

where the costs of staying where you are

become greater than the cost of moving

to something different perhaps something

radically different and we need to

change and open up all of our

institutions so this technology push a

demographic kicked from a new generation

and a demand Paul from a new economic

and global environment is causing the

world to open up now I think in fact

we’re at a turning point in human

history where we can finally now rebuild

many of the institutions of the

Industrial Age around a new set of

principles now what is openness well as

it turns out openness has a number of

different meanings and for each there’s

a corresponding principle for the

transformation of civilization the first

is collaboration now this is openness in

the sense of the boundaries of

organizations becoming more porous and

fluid and open the guy in the picture

here I’ll tell you story is his name is

Rob McEwen I’d like to say I have this

think tank we scour the world for

amazing case studies the reason I know

this story is because he’s my neighbor

he actually moved across the street from

us and he held a cocktail party to meet

the neighbors and he says your your Don

Tom’s got it read some of your books

they said great what are you doing he

says well I used to be a banker and now

I’m a gold miner and he tells me this

amazing story he takes over this gold

mine and his geologist can’t tell him

where the gold is he gives him more

money for geological data they come back

they can’t tell him where to go into

production after a few years he’s so

frustrated he’s ready to give up but he

has an epiphany one day he wonders if my

geologists don’t know where the gold is

maybe somebody else does so he does a

radical thing he takes his geological

data he publishes it and he holds a

contest on the internet called the gold

court challenge it’s basically half a

million dollars in prize money for

anyone who can tell me do I have any

gold and if so where is it

he gets submissions from all around the

world they use techniques that he’s

never heard heard of and for his half a

million dollars in prize money Rob

McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth

of gold the market value of his company

goes from 90 million to 10 billion

dollars and I can tell you because he’s

my neighbor

he’s a happy camper you know

conventional wisdom says talent is

inside right your most precious asset

goes out the elevator every night he

viewed talent differently

he wondered who are their peers he

should have fired his geology department

but he didn’t you know some of the best

submissions didn’t come from geologists

they came from computer scientists

engineers the winner was a computer

graphics company that built a

three-dimensional model the mine well

you can helicopter underground and see

where the gold is he helped us

understand that social medias becoming

social production it’s not about hooking

up online this is a new means of

production in the making and this idea

gora that he created in an open market

Agora for uniquely qualified minds was

part of a change it a profound change in

the deep structured architecture of our

organizations and how we sort of

orchestrate capability to innovate to

create goods and services

with the rest of the world in terms of

government how we create public value

openness is about collaboration now

secondly openness is about transparency

this is different here we’re talking

about the communication of pertinent

information to stakeholders of

organizations employees customers

business partners shareholders and so on

and everywhere our institutions are

becoming naked people are all bent out

of shape about WikiLeaks but that’s just

the tip of the iceberg you see people at

their fingertips now everybody not just

Julian Assange have had these powerful

tools for finding out what’s going on

scrutinizing and forming others and even

organizing collective responses

institutions are becoming naked and if

you’re gonna be naked well that there’s

some crawler ease that flow from that I

mean one is Fitness is no longer

optional you know or if you’re going to

be naked you better get buff now by buff

I mean you need to have good value

because value is evidence like never

before you say oh good products it

better be good but you also need to have

values you need to have integrity as

part of your bones and your DNA as an

organization because if you don’t you’d

be unable to build trust and Trust is a

sign of cuándo of this new networked

world so this is good it’s not bad

sunlight is the best disinfectant and we

need a lot of sunlight in this troubled

world

now the third meaning and corresponding

principle of openness is about sharing

now this is different than transparency

transparencies about the communication

of information sharing is about giving

up assets intellectual property there

all kinds of famous stories about this

IBM gave her a four hundred million

dollars of software to the Linux

movement and that gave them a

multi-billion dollar payoff now

conventional wisdom says well hey our

intellectual property belongs to us and

if someone tries to infringe it we’re

gonna get out our lawyers and we’re

gonna sue them well it didn’t work so

well for the record labels did it I mean

they took they had a technology

disruption and rather than taking a

business model innovation

to correspond to that they took and

sought a legal solution and the industry

that brought you Elvis and the Beatles

is now suing children is and is in

danger of collapse so we need to think

differently about an intellectual

property I’ll give you an example the

pharmaceutical industry is in deep

trouble first of all there aren’t a lot

of big inventions in the pipeline this

is a big problem for human health and

the pharmaceutical industry is got a

bigger problem that they’re about to

fall off something called the patents

cliff do you know about this they’re

gonna lose twenty to thirty five percent

of their revenue in the next twelve

months and what are you gonna do like

cut back on paper clips or something no

we need to reinvent the whole model of

scientific research the pharmaceutical

industry needs to place assets in the

Commons they need to start sharing

pre-competitive research they need to

start sharing clinical trial data and in

doing so create a rising tide that could

lift all boats not just for the industry

but for humanity now the fourth meaning

of openness and corresponding principle

is about empowerment and I’m not talking

about the motherhood sense here

knowledge and intelligence is power and

as it becomes more distributed there’s a

concomitant distribution and

decentralization and disaggregation of

power that’s underway in the world today

the open world is bringing freedom now

take the Arab Spring the debate about

the role of social media and social

change has been settled you know one

word Tunisia and then it ended up having

a whole bunch of other words too but in

the Tunisian revolution the new media

didn’t cause the revolution it was

caused by injustice social media didn’t

create the revolution it was created by

a new generation of young people wanted

jobs and hope and who who didn’t want to

be treated as subjects anymore but just

as the internet drops transaction and

collaboration costs and business

and government it also drops the cost of

dissent of rebellion and even

insurrection in ways that people didn’t

understand you know during the Tunisian

Revolution snipers associated with the

regime were killing unarmed students in

the street so the students would take

their mobile devices

take a picture triangulate the location

send that picture to friendly military

units who’d come in and take out the

snipers you think that social media is

about hooking up online for these kids

it was a military tool to defend unarmed

people from murderers as a tool of

self-defense you know as we speak today

young people are being killed in Syria

and up until three months ago if you

were injured on the street an ambulance

would pick you up take you to the

hospital you’d go in say with a broken

leg and you come out with a bullet in

your head

so these 20-somethings create an

alternative healthcare system or what

they did is they use Twitter and basic

publicly available tools that when

someone’s injured a car would show up it

would pick them up take them to a

makeshift medical clinic where you get

medical treatment as opposed to being

executed so this is a time of great

change now it’s not without its problems

up until two years ago all revolutions

in human history had a leadership and

when the old regime fell the the

leadership and the organization would

take power well these ricky revolutions

happen so fast they create a vacuum and

politics abhors a vacuum and unsavory

forces can fill that typically the old

regime or extremists or fundamentalist

forces you can see that’s playing out

today in Egypt but that doesn’t matter

because this is moving forward the train

has left the station the cat is out of

the bag the horse is out of the bar help

me out here okay the toothpaste is out

of the tube I mean we’re not putting

this one back the open world is bringing

empowerment and freedom I think at the

end of these four days that you’ll come

to conclude that the arc of history is a

positive one and it’s towards openness

if you go back a few hundred years

all around the world it was a very

closed society was agrarian and the

means of production and political system

was called feudalism and knowledge was

concentrated in the church and and the

nobility people didn’t know about things

there was no concept of progress you

were born you lived your life and you

died but then Johannes Gutenberg came

along with his great invention and over

time the society opened up people

started to learn about things and when

they did the institutions of feudal

society appeared to be stalled or frozen

or failing it didn’t make sense for the

church to be responsible for medicine

when people had knowledge so we saw the

Protestant Reformation Martin Luther

called the printing press God’s highest

act of grace creation of a corporation

science the university eventually the

Industrial Revolution and it was all

good but it came with a cost and now

once again the technology genie is out

of the bottle but this time it’s

different

the printing press gave us access to the

written word the internet enables each

of us to be a producer the the printing

press gave us access to recorded

knowledge the internet gives us access

not just the information and knowledge

but to the intelligence contained in the

cranium other people on a on a global

basis to me this is not an Information

Age it’s an age of networked

intelligence it’s an age a vast promise

an age of collaboration where the

boundaries of our organizations are

changing of transparency where sunlight

is disinfecting civilization an age of

sharing and understanding the new power

of the commons and it’s an age of

empowerment and a freedom now what I’d

like to do is to close to share with you

some research that I’ve been doing and

try to study all kinds of organizations

to understand what the future might look

like

but I’ve been studying nature recently

you know bees come in swarms and fish

come in schools starlings in the area

around Edinburgh and the Moors of

England come in something called a

murmuration and the murmuration refers

to the murmuring of the wings of the

birds and throughout the day the

starlings are out over a 20-mile radius

sort of doing their Starling thing and

at night they come together and they

create one of the most spectacular

things in all of nature and it’s called

a murmuration and scientists that have

studied this has said they’d never seen

an accident now this thing has a

function it protects the birds you can

see on the right here there’s a predator

being chased away by the collective

power of the birds and perrolli this is

a frightening thing if you’re a predator

of starlings

and there’s leadership but there’s no

one leader now is this some kind of

fanciful analogy or could we actually

learn something from this well the

murmuration function still cord a number

of principles and they’re basically the

principles that I’ve described to you

today this is a huge collaboration it’s

an openness there’s a sharing of all

kinds of information not just about

location and trajectory and and danger

and so on but about food sources and

there’s a real sense of interdependence

that the individual birds somehow

understand that their interests are in

the interests of the collective perhaps

like we should understand that the

business can’t succeed in a world that’s

failing why look at this thing

and I get a lot of hope think about the

kids today and

Arab Spring and you see something like

this that’s underway and imagine just

consider this idea if you would what if

we could connect ourselves in this world

through a vast network of air and glass

could we go beyond to sharing

information and knowledge could we start

to share our intelligence could we

create some kind of collective

intelligence that goes beyond an

individual or a group or a team to

create perhaps some kind of

consciousness on a global basis well if

we could do this we could attack some

big problems in the world and I look at

this thing and I I don’t know I get a

lot of hope that maybe this smaller

network to open world that our kids

inherit might be a better one and that

this new age of networked intelligence

could be an age of promise fulfilled and

the peril unrequited let’s do this thank

you