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