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1975: Steve Sasson, an engineer working at Kodak, invents the digital camera.

1991: Kodak jointly launches with Nikon a professional camera of 1.3 megapixels.

1995: First “point and shoot” camera.

The 19^th of January of 2012 Kodak opted for a process of arrangement of creditors, relying on the sale of its 1.100 patents to any of the big actors in digital photography or to a specialist in the exploitation of patents.

Lack of innovation has not been Kodak’s problem. But there are three pictures that Kodak could have made and, inexplicably, did not.

Picture 1: The champion of digital photography

The adoption of digital photography started out slowly, accelerated with the widespread usage of Internet and exploded with smartphones.

Kodak invented it but was not agile enough to change a business model based on subsidising cameras and generating profit through film and paper.

Nobody wanted to see it or no one had the courage to assume the consequences. No one was able to put the user in the centre and realize that, for everyday people, a photo is synonymous of a moment and therefore its value rises above quality.

Slow speed in the shot, excess of light, the object is undistinguishable.

Picture 2: Social photo album

Pictures are made to capture a unique moment with the purpose of reliving them in later occasions, and sharing them with others. Photos are not only made, they are used and reused.

If you have been in the photographic industry for 130 years, you know this. If you have decided to name the wheel of film slides “carrousel” to evoke the childhood merry-go-round, you use it. When you associate holiday vacations to Kodak, you proclaim it.

Kodak had the biggest community of photo devotees that ever existed, until Flickr arrived and became the reference of a social photo album. Instagram, the popular app to share pictures, is now the largest native mobile community, above Foursquare. If you know this, use it.

Depth of the field badly adjusted. Key knowledge is out of focus, unseen in midst of the landscape.

Picture 3: the technological platform for digital images  

When Kodak invented the digital camera it not only invented a product, but also a whole industry, the same one that has forced its disappearance. Surprise: 85% of digital cameras and interactive telephones use some of Kodak’s technology.

You may not able to change the direction of a giant aircraft carrier in time. But clearly you cannot stop a tsunami. You may receive an important amount from the insurance after the lawsuits but it will be already too late.

Maybe the most relevant strategic decision to be taken in open scenarios is a matter of balance. Deciding what to share so as to maintain a decisive position in the system and, at the same time, knowing what to keep in order to exploit it as an exclusive value.

This article has been published by Yorokobu, our favourite magazine

Imagine that the technological institute where you have been investigating for years on how to develop a user friendly electronic board for students is threatened by the possibility of shutting down. That was the case of Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, who along with his team decided to openly publish the design of their board under a CC license (Creative Commons) which allows others to build upon their work as long as they credit them as authors and license their new creations under identical terms (BY SA).

Despite the fact that anybody can manufacture an exact same board, several people choose the one with signature “made in Italy” even if they have to pay more for it. The Arduino team has become the reference in open hardware design and as a consequence it also offers consulting services.

Imagine now you inherit a goldmine in Canada. You spend a fortune hiring the best geologists; you get a complete geological mapping but you haven’t found one golden nugget.

Rob McEwen, Goldcorp’s owner, launched in 2000 the Goldcorp Challenge; he openly published all the maps he had and offered a prize of 575.000 US$ to whom would help him find gold. The competitors for the prize identified more than 110 areas of the terrain where 80% resulted to be profitable for gold extraction. 8 million ounces of gold were found. McEwen calculates that this open collaboration had saved him in between 2 to 3 years of exploration studies.

Last one, for now. Imagine that you are a big corporation such as Oracle or Dell and you are developing a promising business to manage huge amounts of raw data. Hadoop Appears.

Hadoop is an open source computer software supervised by Apache Foundation which offers two services: data hosting, and processing using a technique named MapReduce. Oracle, Dell, NetApp and EMC are already adopting it, accelerating its diffusion and contributing to the project as it evolves in an open and sustainable manner.

It’s the power of open. Do you join it?

Anyone can access without asking for permission or forgiveness. There are already too many opportunities where opening, sharing, and enabling the availability of a common resource are becoming a more profitable choice than keeping it closed.

When that of what is open gets to congregate enough interest and participation of a number of agents that exploit it for their own benefit, while they contribute to it’s development, it becomes unstoppable.

Open systems act in  favour of any agent  in two ways: offering support and encouragement to explore any available opportunities and having at its disposal a growing array of developed solutions to market. Sequential strategies: first this, then that, cannot cope in scope and speed.

Cooperation between interdependent agents that share a common resource alter, when able to create a competitive open standard, the centre of gravity of industries that appeared restricted to big actors. Software, hardware, education, science, innovation, government, even the production of commercial vehicles, are being affected by the “open phenomenon”.

This article has been published in Yorokobu, our favourite magazine