Chapter 6

This chapter attempts to reveal why innovators are willing to freely reveal information.

When an innovator decides to freely reveal, the information is not always made available to the public with no cost. For example, the information may only be accessible via a magazine or other type of subscription. What does change is the creators ability to sell that information and make a profit from it. Von Hippel sites a few studies that show sharing of important and advantageous information by profit seeking companies dating back to the nineteenth century. New ideas and techniques were often published in trade journals. Free revealing has also been found frequently in more modern businesses such as IBM, though there is often a slight delay between implementation and publishing of the information.

Von Hipple argues that attempts to keep innovations secret may be easily circumvented. Companies often have "similar information" that can lead to the same breakthrough, or a slightly different one. The author backs up his argument with a study done by himself and Lakhani (see pg 82) about Apache help-line websites. Many trade secrets are also discovered by piecing together several forms of readily available information. Secrets held by one or few are very difficult to keep secret. In many cases contractors and business partners gain access to private information in order to do business with an individual or company, making leaks of information very probable.

Some studies have found that patents are not as useful for protecting information as they were once thought to be, though a few companies make substantial profits from licensing information.

Active efforts to make innovations made known serve as evidence that there are in fact benefits to freely revealing information. Programmers often do so in order to bolster their own personal portfolio. People are eager to make their information known quickly in order to promote widespread adaptation of their work. There are also many intangible benefits such as satisfaction and expression of creativity that motivate programmers to work on open source software outside of their paid careers.

Reflection:

I found this chapter to be interesting and important because of its look at the underlying causes of free revealing. The benefits of free knowledge are obvious for society and markets, but without motivation for innovators, almost all profitable knowledge would be locked away. Some of von Hippel's arguments were not very well backed up but all of his points were thought provoking and relevant.