25th April, the day of freedom

25th April, the day of freedom

[:en]Some months ago I discovered “Threadless: a Community based teeshirt company with an ongoing, open call for tee design submission” .

Based on the idea of open innovation, or in other words, that the best ideas come most of the time outside your company.

I like it very much: you can participate and taking advantages from the community in various ways. If you are a dress designer, you can submit your design and if it is choosen for print you get money (increasing if your design is a “best award”), or maybe you think to be better to play with words, so you can submit a “slogan” and get money for this. Finally, if you think to be a beautyful model you can submit a photo wearing one of these tees and get money for this, again. Also if you make adv, putting a link on your blog to your profile you get money. (Also, I tested it as a buyer and I have nothing to complain). Clara pacta: in the legal terms condition, you accept to give to the company the property right of your intellectual production.

Something like to Fluebog and the “open source shoes“, discovered thanks to Open Innovator Blog. Really, as they also say, the Fluebog model don’t have anything to do with opensource: Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either – but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.”

Women shoes designThe only “clara pacta” is that putting a design in this website, the designer get visibility and in the best case, he/she could have the opportunity to get a free pair of shoes named with his/her name based on the “public domain” design.

Open Innovation is something different from “open source”. As Shirky writes in his very interesting book “Here comes everybody”, the open source movement demonstrates how it is possible to “lower the cost of failure”, “Cheap failure, valuable as it it on its own, is also a key part or a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities”.

In this sense open source is a model for “rearranging the relations between the contributors”.

Innocentive inc. make just this. They act as a brokers for intellectual properties in a new way. They protect the identity of companies that need solutions to a problem and they try to find solvers, all over the world, protecting their intellectual rights. In this way, they lower the cost for the company research. My preferred history related to Innocentive is the one about a new light bulb, in which Innocentive helped to find a solution for giving artificial light to Africa, finding and supporting the invention of inexpensive solar-powered flashlights (distributed with the model get 1, give 1).

Mass customization, open innovation, crowdsourcing: you can call as you prefer but the question is that all we really need to act together and for doing this we need freedom.

For this reason this post is my contribution in celebrating the 25th April,1945 – The day in wich Nazi occupation army leaves Northern Italy after a general partisan insurrection by the Italian resistance movement. This day is taken as symbolic of the Liberation of Italy.[:]

One thought on “25th April, the day of freedom

  1. Hi Elenora –

    Thank you for mentioning InnoCentive your recent blog post. I like the way that you characterize us as brokers for intellectual property in a new way. Given your interest in the light bulb, I thought you might also find another challenge that we are currently reviewing submissions for of interest. It is a challenge to develop a solar powered wireless router posted by the ASSET India Foundation to help to provide Internet in rural locations in India.

    If you ever need further information on InnoCentive, I would be happy to speak with you.
    Regards,
    Connie French
    InnoCentive

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