New Left Review 89, September-October 2014

nancy ettlinger

THE OPENNESS PARADIGM

Who could object to ‘open innovation’? The term, which has migrated from software development to become a staple of business-management strategy, seems to conjure the most desirable aspects of contemporary American capitalism: freedom, creativity, democratic accessibility, the possibility of new frontiers. The ‘openness’ paradigm promises to combine new production systems, made possible by the technologies of Web 2.0 and the shrunken space of globalization, with novel forms of business organization and value extraction; it offers a powerful weapon in inter-firm competition and a new regime of labour. The paradigm has been promoted by a torrent of books and articles from us business schools over the past decade. In 2003 a Google search for ‘open innovation’ brought up 200 results, according to Henry Chesbrough, one of the gurus of the field and Director of the Centre for Open Innovation at Berkeley’s Hass Business School. [1] Henry Chesbrough, ‘Everything You Need to Know about Open Innovation’, Forbes, 21 March 2011. By 2013, the figure was 672,000,000.

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