In 2001, Rob McEwen, chairman and CEO of gold mining company Goldcorp Inc, decided to make a bold move by issuing an extraordinary challenge to the world’s geologists: We’ll show you all of our data on the Red Lake mine online if you tell us where we’re likely to find the next 6 million ounces of gold. The prize: a total of $575,000, with a top award of $105,000. The result? Overwhelming success. Read more…
Up till 2002, Amazon had spent more than 10 years and a billion dollars to build, organize, and safeguard product descriptions, prices, sales rankings, customer reviews, inventory figures, and countless other layers of content. Then, in a swift move, it decided to open up its files for the world to scrutinize. Soon eBay and Google followed suit and made similar moves to open up their treasure vaults of stored information. Why? Because it was the smartest thing to do. Read more…
What establishes a university’s competitive advantage comparative to other equivalent universities? Is it the creation of intellectual property (lectures, slides, books, content)? Or, is it the free-flowing, thought-advancing community existent at most well-funded universities? In 2001 MIT gave it’s answer to this question by creating the OpenCourseWare program, that gives away all content from every class offered at both undergraduate and graduate levels for free via the web. Read more…
Three unrelated stories basically telling the same tale – information is not what it used to be.
Traditionally, businesses have treated their information as their key asset and have guarded it as such. A lot of energy has gone into keeping the lid on with non-disclosure agreements, paranoia and siloed departments, trying to prevent competitors from gaining the same knowledge as you have.
In the Internet age, information travels with the speed of sunrise and it is practically impossible to keep under control. Once out, the information will stay there forever.
With the assumption that all have access to the same information that you have, you can no longer regard information as your most valued asset!
At the same time, to successfully operate in a network, you need to share information with your peers in order for operations to function smoothly. How are you going to cooperate closely with a large number of very different companies if you don’t? All in all, we have to arrive at the rather profound realization that information has lost most of its value in the network economy.
That forces us to open up and perform more and more of our operations under the glaring light of the sun. This might seem scary, and for a lot of companies that do business solely with information it is, but it is also a force for improvements. If all can act on some piece of information, the one that acts fastest and smartest will be the winner. And as the three examples at the top shows, this can in fact increase your business rather than hamper it. On the other side of your internet connection are millions of people willing to assist you or your business if you let them. Not utilizing this fact is plain and simple bad business – there is no way for you to be as smart and resourceful as the collective intelligence of the network.
For the notebook:
- The Internet never forgets. Don’t treat information that could one day end up in the public domain as valuable assets.
- Acting on information is everything, owning information is nothing.
- Opening up your information to the world in smart ways actually increases your business. Letting others earn money from your information can, and will, be a spark for innovation that you can utilize for your own good.
August 24, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Yep, it’s a good point. Ideas are cheap. People post them everywhere and it’s very unlikely that you’re the first to think of one you believe is unique. Management and execution are key. All of that being said, there is managerial information that is very valuable and not easily obtained, but not necessarily super-confidential because it matters only to your organization.