Chapter 7. The Jam Central Model

In the Orchestra model, the firm has a very clear sense for the nature of the innovation it seeks to co-create with partners. In the Creative Bazaar model, while the initial innovative idea might emerge from the inventor community, the firm still plays the dominant role in deciding how the innovation will evolve into a market-ready product or service. Sometimes, however, innovations are emergent in nature and involve the community to a much greater extent—taking shape through the collaborative efforts of contributors, and evolving in ways that are not well-understood at the outset. Recalling our analogy from the music business, we look at a different approach to creating network-centric innovation that is akin to musicians jamming together to create new music. In introducing the Jam Central model in Chapter 3, “The Four Models of Network-Centric Innovation,” we compared musical jamming sessions to collaborative innovation, and we identified three themes that define the essence of the Jam Central model:

• An emergent innovation vision and goals that evolve from intense interactions among the community members

• A diffused leadership structure that relies on each member of the community

• An infrastructure to support improvisation and sharing of innovation benefits

An innovation initiative that embodies all of these themes is the development of Apache, an Open Source Web server software that runs on most operating systems, including UNIX and Windows. First created in 1996, Apache has established itself as the most popular Web server on the Internet; more than 70% of all Web sites on the Internet currently use Apache, making it more widely used than all other Web servers combined.¹

The history of Apache can be traced back to the early 1990s when a group of individuals started working on improving the HTTPD server originally developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. When the resulting product—Apache server v 0.6.2—was released in April 1995, it took off immediately in the Web server market as an open source alternative to other proprietary products. In 1999, as the project got wider recognition and attracted more volunteers, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was established to better organize and channel the creative contributions of the volunteer community.

An interesting twist in the Apache story is that while the original effort was focused solely on creating and supporting the Apache Web server product, by the early 2000s, a broader vision had emerged in the community—a vision that encompassed projects related to a number of other aspects of the World Wide Web. In this broader vision, the ASF was no longer just a Web server initiative; instead, it had evolved into an innovation community tied together by a common set of values (including meritocracy and openness) and pursuing a more emergent set of software development goals.

As the number of community members (or innovation participants) and the diversity of the innovation projects grew, the Apache community adopted a very open governance structure. Each project has its own separate project management committee, comprised of members committed to that project, which exercises full autonomy on project-related decisions and activities. A central board (again comprised of the most committed set of community members) keeps the community together through appropriate support activities. New project ideas from individual members are evaluated not for the nature of the project (all project ideas are equally welcome) but for the potential for the group associated with that project to adhere to the overall community goals, norms, and values.

The Web-based infrastructure at Apache.org supports the collaborative process and enables the community members to come together and contribute to the various individual projects. Further, all the output from the community’s innovation efforts is made available in the public domain under the open Apache license, benefiting the broader community.

The Apache initiative underscores the key tenets of the Jam Central model outlined earlier—an emergent innovation vision being pursued in a community-led environment in a manner that benefits all the community members. Such a collaborative innovation model is clearly evident in many other parts of the software industry, too—from operating systems and Web servers to enterprise applications and end-user tools.

But the Jam Central model has applicability well beyond software. It is being applied with success in a wide range of domains and industries that are quite different from software. In this chapter, we describe examples from two very different industry contexts—the biomedical research field and the consumer interactive-services industry—to illustrate the key aspects of the Jam Central model. By considering such divergent contexts, we hope to demonstrate how broadly this model can be applied.

We start with the case of the Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI)—a community-based innovation initiative in the area of biomedical research.

Finding Cures by “Jammin” Together: The Tropical Disease Initiative and The Synaptic Leap

Tropical diseases are a largely neglected frontier in the commercial drug discovery arena. Only about 1% of all newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases.² Most of the tropical diseases occur in developing countries in Africa and Asia where patients can seldom afford to pay the high prices that are typical of patented drugs. As such, there is limited interest from commercial pharmaceutical firms to pursue drug discovery in this area. As the World Health Organization report notes, tropical diseases represent both the greatest need and the opportunity for open collaborative research, one that is not dependent on commercial proprietary solutions.³

The TDI is a Web-based, collaborative innovation effort aimed at identifying cures for tropical diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. The project was launched by a group of scientists and researchers including Stephen Maurer of the University of California at Berkeley, Arti Rai of Duke University, and Andrej Sali of the University of California at San Francisco. The TDI project aims to bring together computational biologists and other volunteer researchers to work collaboratively on specific tropical diseases and then makes the results of such collaborative innovation available in the public domain, where other researchers could use them to guide their clinical research work.

Drug discovery is particularly well-suited to a collaborative innovation approach because of the dichotomy of tasks involved in drug R&D. The R&D process consists of two broad types of tasks: knowledge-based tasks and rule-based tasks. Knowledge-based tasks call for deep domain knowledge along with intelligence and judgment capabilities but very limited laboratory or other technical infrastructure. Examples of knowledge-based tasks include identifying promising targets, designing computerized disease models, and so on. As Bernard Munos wrote in Nature, such knowledge-based tasks are “about scientists leveraging each other’s ideas and using tools to gain deeper insights that might lead to breakthroughs”⁴—in other words, building on and improvising through continued interactions. On the other hand, rule-based tasks involve clinical experimentation and require significant laboratory facilities, equipment, study subjects (patients), and funding. Examples of such tasks include clinical trials, toxicology studies, and other lab-intensive work. Rule-based tasks are also subject to rigid regulatory requirements, so they tend to require highly structured and controlled research environments. Thus, while a Web-based collaborative innovation model might not be appropriate for rule-based tasks, it is an excellent approach to carry out knowledge-based tasks.⁵

Collaborative work in knowledge-based tasks has become even more promising due to the increasing importance of computation in the drug discovery process.⁶ Indeed, computing and biology are converging rapidly, opening up new possibilities for organizing collaborative innovation efforts. Computing resources have become cheaper and more widely available. New distributed computing techniques allow spare computing resources distributed across organizational and national boundaries to be integrated into a powerful common infrastructure. And, newer and more powerful software tools are becoming available for drug discovery. These new tools can help scientists identify promising protein targets and lead chemical compounds, mine genomic databases, visualize bind sites, map metabolic networks, and design complex molecules. These tools can work on diverse medical databases and enable volunteers to participate in the innovation project from their homes. Further, many of these tools are now available as Open Source tools. For example, the OpenScience project is dedicated to developing and releasing free scientific software for drug discovery and other research purposes.⁷

These two factors—more computing resources and better tools—have radically changed the face of computational drug discovery. The founders of TDI, Steve Maurer, Arti Rai, and Andrej Sali, draw parallels between computational drug discovery and software development:

Very similar to the way software developers find bugs and write patches in open source projects, biologists look for proteins (“targets”) and select chemicals (“drug candidates”) that bind to them and affect their behavior in desirable ways. In both cases, innovative contributions consist of finding opportunities and fixing tiny problems hidden in an ocean of code.⁸

The TDI-TSL Network

The TDI brings together a community of researchers and scientists who have common interests related to drug discovery and are willing to volunteer their time and effort in collaboratively pursuing such interests. The TDI offers a Web-based environment that helps to integrate scientific talent, computing resources (for example, software tools), and a wide variety of chemical, biological, and medical databases. In this environment, TDI partners with another entity called The Synaptic Leap (TSL).

TSL is a North Carolina–based non-profit organization founded in 2005 by Ginger Taylor, a software professional. TSL provides a package of Web-based facilities to support open collaborative biomedical research.⁹ The Web site provides the vehicle for organizing the different research tools, technologies, and databases and making them available to the community members (scientists). Members can peruse the research tasks on the Web site, choose the one that they are interested in working on, and register themselves as contributors. Contributors can then download any necessary data and tools and start working on that data. Other Web-based facilities (for example, chat rooms, wikis, blogs, and discussion boards) provide the communication infrastructure for the community to discuss and debate the innovative ideas in each project. Thus, by providing the Web-based infrastructure, TSL complements the resources and capabilities of the TDI. As Taylor notes, “After speaking (with the TDI founders), I discovered that their heart is really in the biomedical science. They have little interest in building and running a collaborative Web site. We therefore combined forces; they provide inputs to us, and we build and maintain the site where they and other scientists can collaborate.”¹⁰

There are three types of players in the TDI-TSL network. A core body of founding members (which includes people from TDI and TSL) plays the role of the innovation steward by providing the broad direction for the community and facilitating collaboration and communication among members. Scientists from all over the world contribute to individual projects by volunteering their time and scientific expertise. In so doing, they play the role of innovators. Their incentives include reputational benefits, acquisition of new skills and knowledge, expanding their professional network, and the prospect of gaining prominence in the employment market. Finally, external organizations (for-profit as well as non-profit) play the role of innovation sponsors by providing funding and other types of resources, including computing resources, software tools, and so on.

TDI has defined a broad focus on tropical diseases. However, the specific projects are left to individual contributors or community members. Any contributor can propose a new project, and as long as the project falls within the broad scope of TDI and there is sufficient interest among the community members, it will be incorporated into the fold. The first active project in the TDI portfolio is focused on malaria.

As noted earlier, the goals and activities of the community are emergent. For example, consider the evolution of the Schistosomiasis project. Soon after the malaria project took off in the TDL-TSL forum, Mathew Todd, a chemist from the University of Sydney, had an idea for an open research project for Schistosomiasis. His objective was to develop a cheaper process for producing Praziquantal, the current treatment for Schistosomiasis. He interacted with the TDI founders and expressed his interest in starting this new project and was encouraged to collaborate with Ginger Taylor to come up with a more formal outline of the project and the design of the community site. His blog post on the proposed project on the TSL Web forum elicited many positive reactions from the community members. One such volunteer was Jean-Claude Bradley, a chemist from Drexel University in Philadelphia. Bradley found Todd’s post and began to offer ideas for collaboratively pursuing those research goals. With sufficient interest expressed by community members, it was evident that the project had legs and Todd volunteered to play the role of the Schisto community leader. Over the next few months, he worked with TSL’s Taylor to develop an information architecture to serve as the portal for the Schisto collaborative research project.

Similarly, new projects are being defined and initiated as part of TDI. For example, the idea for a project on Chagas, a disease that plagues South America, was suggested by a young biology researcher from Venezuela. Similarly, another scientist, Miguel Mitchell, is leading another new project that relates to tuberculosis. Thus, as new contributors join the community, new research ideas emerge, get shared and built upon, and evolve into individual projects.

Moving from the Lab to the Market

A critical issue in the TDI network relates to intellectual property rights and production of drugs. Specifically, who “owns” the output from the TDI projects and how should such outputs reach the “market”? The TDI community members have at their disposal several intellectual property ownership options. Researchers always have the right to publish their ideas in traditional peer-reviewed scientific journals. In addition, the Science Commons offers public domain licenses (similar to the Creative Commons licensing scheme) that can be used to make available the leads or targets generated through the TDI project to other scientists for follow-up work.

Similarly, if a promising lead or a new compound is generated through the TDI project, then its further development can be outsourced. Note that the early drug discovery processes, which form the primary focus of TDI, occur at a pre-commercial stage and typically the output might not have reached a patentable stage. However, here given the niche focus of TDI, the objective is to keep the new knowledge created in the public domain so that all the different options to exploit such knowledge can be exercised. This includes outsourcing the clinical trials and production to non-profit pharmaceutical entities or “Virtual Pharma” entities like the Institute for One World Health and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.

The TDI innovation network owes its early success to several factors: the emergence of computational biology as a powerful and sophisticated vehicle to research and discover new drug candidates, the ability of Web-based infrastructure to bring together hundreds of scientists and researchers who are willing to donate their time and knowledge in collaborative research, and the alternative systems and mechanisms available to protect and share the intellectual property rights in the public domain. These forces have enabled the creation of a collaborative research forum that adheres to all three central tenets of the Jam Central model—an emergent innovation vision and goals, a community-led diffused leadership structure, and a robust infrastructure to support collaborative knowledge creation and value appropriation.

Other Instances of the Jam Central Model in Biomedical Research

Another set of examples of the Jam Central model evident in biomedical research relates to the open databases approach. The more famous examples include the Human Genome Project, the SNP consortium, and the International HapMap project.

Consider the International HapMap project. The project is a multi-country effort to identify and catalog genetic similarities and differences in human beings.¹¹ The HapMap (Haplotype Mapping) is a catalog of common genetic variants that occur in human beings. Using the information in the HapMap, researchers will be able to find genes that affect health, disease, and individual responses to medications and environmental factors. In other words, researchers can link haplotypes (patterns of genetic variation) to disease phenotypes. The project, started in October 2002, involves scientists and funding agencies from six countries: Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Nigeria, and the United States. The project releases all information generated by researchers into the public domain. However, the information is released under a “click-wrap” license, which requires those who access the HapMap database to agree that they will not file product patent applications if such patents are built upon, even if only in part, HapMap data.¹² In other words, the HapMap project adopts the “copyleft” licensing scheme.¹³

Although the project does not allow just anybody to get involved—only those who are tied to the affiliated organizations can contribute—the overall structure of the initiative follows the Jam Central model. The network of scientists maintains a broad innovation vision for the project—for example, in this case, to develop a haplotype map of the human genome so as to describe the common patterns of human genetic variation—and collaborate by improvising and building upon each others’ research work. The leadership for individual projects is diffused to the local level and the central network infrastructure is used to share as well as protect the rights to the data and the other outputs from the project.

To see how the Jam Central model can be applied to a very different context, we shift our focus to the creation of Web-based consumer interactive services and the case of Second Life.

Creating Consumer Experiences by “Jammin” Together: The Second Life

In 1992, Neal Stephenson authored a now-classic science fiction novel called Snow Crash in which he envisioned a successor to today’s Internet—a virtual reality–based Internet that he called the Metaverse. In Stephenson’s Metaverse, denizens create “avatars” or online virtual bodies and their social status derives from the sophistication of their avatars. The Metaverse inspired several attempts to create such virtual reality worlds and implement some of the concepts he described in his book. By the time the 1990s rolled around, 3-D technologies had also advanced significantly, and such virtual world implementations became feasible.

One of the first Metaverse-like 3-D virtual reality worlds was Active World, launched in June 1995. It was soon followed by a host of other implementations including There, Second Life, The Palace, Uru, Dotsoul Cyberpark, Blaxxun, and Entropia Universe. While some of these no longer exist and some are on their way out, perhaps the most representative—and definitely, the most well-known—is Second Life.

Second Life (SL) is a partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world that was launched in 2003 by Linden Lab—a privately held, San Francisco-based company founded in 1999 by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life “world” resides in a vast array of computer servers owned and operated by Linden Lab. The company also provides the Web-based tools and technologies for users to create, view, and modify their avatars and the other objects in the SL world and participate in its virtual economy. The resident population in SL has been growing exponentially since its inception—on October 18, 2006, the population hit the 1 million mark, and by July 2007, it had reached 7 million.

The goal of Linden Lab is to create a user-defined Metaverse-like “virtual world” in which users or “residents” can interact, play, and participate in other activities. However, SL is much more than a 3-D virtual world for entertainment. Linden Lab sees itself as being in the business of hosting and facilitating “consumer experience” innovation. SL offers diverse types of experiences to its residents. These experiences are not created by Linden Lab—they are created collaboratively by the residents through individual creativity and interactions. The role of Linden Lab is to provide the context and the tools for residents to create those experiences. In short, Second Life is a massive experiment in collaborative experience innovation. As such, it is an excellent example of the Jam Central model—while the innovation space constitutes “user experiences,” the nature of these experiences (that is, the innovation goals) are emergent and the residents (that is, the innovators) “jam together,” improvise in innovating those experiences and share in the fruits of the innovation.

The SL Network and the Players

Let us consider the nature of the innovation network and the players in SL. Broadly, the innovation network in SL consists of three players: Linden Lab plays the role of innovation steward, individuals and other residents of SL play the role of the innovators and corporations seeking to connect to the community play the role of innovation sponsors.

Linden Lab’s primary role is to facilitate experience innovation in SL by bringing the collaborators together and providing them with the supporting tools and technologies to innovate and the infrastructure to appropriate and share the value from the innovations. Its success in this role can be traced to three key ideas of Linden Lab founder, Rosedale.

Rosedale’s first key idea was to create a live forum that could bring together the residents and host their interactions. These live interactions form the experience—nothing is predetermined or pre-designed. Linden Lab’s computers do all the intense computational work that is needed to keep the SL dynamic and as live as the real world.

The second key idea was to support residents’ creativity by offering easy-to-use tools and technologies that can be used to create objects (including residents’ own avatars) in SL. While the technologies are user-friendly, they are powerful enough to support the diverse creative talent that residents bring to SL. For example, one such tool is a 3-D Modeler that allows residents to create complex objects—ranging from avatar attachments to buildings, sculptures, and gardens—out of a set of basic building blocks. Residents can then use SL’s scripting language (called Linden Scripting Language) to apply scripts to shape the behavior of the objects they create. SL also provides tools to add texture to the surface of any 3-D object (for example, tattoos on an avatar’s skin) to enhance its richness. Multimedia capabilities (for example, sound) can also be added to such objects. This powerful suite of tools enables residents to create very rich objects in SL that exhibit diverse behaviors and lead to diverse experiences through their interactions.

The third decision that Rosedale made was to allow the residents to retain the right to their creation, whether it be their own avatar or any other object that they created in SL. This feature allowed Linden Lab to develop a truly collaborative innovation environment in SL that emphasizes the residents’ role as innovators.

As innovators, residents contribute to the community through the objects they create as well as through the interactions they participate in. Thus, the more diverse the residents, the more diverse the overall experiences in the SL world.

Finally, corporate, non-profit, and other types of organizations participate in SL by sponsoring and catalyzing the collaborative experience innovation. As an innovation sponsor, a firm can directly host and facilitate experiences. For example, American Apparel opened an outlet in SL that allows residents to browse through merchandise and shop for virtual clothing for their avatars.¹⁴ The company is now considering test-marketing new styles of jeans in the virtual environment before they are launched in real-life stores. By catalyzing such virtual shopping experiences for residents, the company contributes to the community—in return, garnering additional company exposure and brand recognition. Companies can also sponsor users’ experience innovation. For example, on September 14, 2006, PopSci.com (the online home of Popular Science) sponsored a special live concert in SL that featured popular SL musicians including Jonathan Coulton, Melvin Took, and Etherian Kamaboko.

Managing “Avatar” Behavior and Rights in SL

Members of the SL community are tied to Linden Lab through a set of Terms of Service they agree to when they join the network. This formal agreement allows Linden Lab to establish a basic set of “accepted” behavior or ground rules and specifies consequences if such rules are not adhered to. For example, residents who harass other residents or engage in destructive behavior can be ejected from the community. Similarly, residents can also register civic complains in regular town-hall meetings and these complaints will then be acted upon by Linden staff. These formal governance mechanisms enable Linden Lab to ensure an innovation environment that members would want to be a part of. However, such formal mechanisms are only part of the story.

More important as a governance mechanism are the behavioral norms that exist among the members themselves. Such social mechanisms include group-driven culture and reputational systems. For example, SL is composed of numerous “interest” groups. Individual residents can create groups and invite other residents to join them. Groups can be based on a particular interest or activity. The names of the groups that a resident belongs to are displayed in that user’s profile. Each group can set up its own group leadership team with titles and responsibilities. The groups through their interactions set up their own norms and values—such group-driven culture forms a powerful mechanism to bring coherence to members’ interactions and experiences within SL.

As noted previously, residents own the rights to their innovations in SL—for example, the objects that they create. Even though the actual computer code related to the objects resides on Linden’s servers, residents retain the full intellectual property rights for all the digital content they create. Linden Lab employs the Creative Commons license scheme to enable residents to assign rights to their innovations. This gives residents considerable leeway in deciding how, when, and in what ways other residents can use or build on their innovation.

It is important to note that, while residents might own the rights to the objects they create, “consumer experiences” are based on the interactions among the objects created by the different community members. As such, there is sufficient incentive for community members to share their innovations with others and to facilitate such interactions.

Linden Lab also provides the infrastructure for measuring and monetizing value created in the community. SL has its own currency, referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). Residents can acquire L$ by selling the objects they create. The economy that is based on L$ has grown considerably over the past few years with the increased level of activity in the SL “economy.” In the SL economy, residents can appropriate value from their innovations by transacting in L$. Linden also provides an exchange called the LindeX for residents to convert L$ into US$.

The case of Second Life thus illustrates the application of the Jam Central model in yet another context—the consumer interactive services industry. While the particulars and the details might be different from the earlier contexts of software and biomedical research, the three themes of the Jam Central model outlined earlier forms the essence of Second Life, too—SL residents (innovators) collaborate and improvise to create new interactive experiences (innovation) in a community-led environment that is supported by an infrastructure for protection and sharing of innovation rights.

Elements of the Jam Central Model

When we compare the different examples of the Jam Central model that we have described in this chapter, we see some common elements that define the essence of this form of network-centric innovation. Table 7.1 summarizes these common elements.

Table 7.1. Elements of the Jam Central Model

The first common thread in all these examples is the emergent nature of the innovation goals, and the need for continuous improvisation through iterations and interactions. The innovation space is only broadly defined—whether it be the focus on tropical diseases in TDI, the Web-based software in the Apache community, or the interactive experiences in Second Life. The specific innovation goals then emerge from the community through the continued interactions of the members. This two-phase goal setting (broad innovation focus and emergent innovation goals) was evident in all the domains we studied and indicates the nature of the community-based leadership structure that provides the foundation for the innovation activities. Such emergent goals lend to a sense of belonging and ownership among community members as they work together to evolve the shared goals and objectives. They also imbue the community with the improvisational spirit that pervades the innovation process. Indeed, the actual innovation is marked by a “call and response” pattern—members respond to and improvise on each others’ contributions to iteratively evolve the innovation.

The second common thread relates to the decentralized nature of decision making in the innovation network. In all the contexts, the diffused leadership is achieved through two mechanisms. The first mechanism enables the entire community to come together to make critical decisions regarding the broader innovation agenda or the community’s goals. In the case of TDI, this task is achieved by an informal body that consists of the founding members and some of the most active community members. In the case of Apache, the task is achieved through the Board of the Apache Software Foundation. The second mechanism operates at the individual project or group level and enables localized decision making that involves only those members who participate (or have a stake) in that project. The combination of these two mechanisms ensures the continued involvement of the community members in the evolution of the innovation agenda as well as the necessary flexibility for individual projects to chart their own path.

A third common thread relates to the nature of the collaboration infrastructure. Given the improvisation nature of the innovation process, the Jam Central model relies on an effective infrastructure to facilitate the constant “give and take” that involves multiple members of the community. Typically, the infrastructure has elements to support both the “social knowledge creation” as well as the development of a “shared world view” that is critical to keep the coherence of the varied innovation activities in the community.

In most cases, the innovation steward had the responsibility to maintain the collaboration infrastructure—whether it is a simple online forum for community members to interact (for example, discussion boards in the Apache community) or more complex facilities to swap knowledge (for example, the wikis and databases in the case of TDI or object repositories in the case of Second Life).

Another important observation in the Jam Central model relates to the appropriation of rewards from the innovation. While there is an emphasis on sharing the fruits of the innovation with the wider community, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all intellectual property rights are released to the community (or to the public domain). Indeed, as we have seen in the case of Second Life, certain rights related to an innovation might stay with an individual member. However, the community might provide the mechanism for individual members to share some of those rights with other community members so that they can build on those innovations. As is evident from the examples, the ability of the community to devise and deploy innovative mechanisms to share intellectual property rights among the community members is essential to ensure the success of the innovation initiatives.

Joining the Jam Sessions: How Large Companies Can Participate

Despite the community-based innovation agenda and governance system of the Jam Central model, abundant opportunities exist for large for-profit companies to participate in such initiatives. However, realizing such opportunities requires companies to understand the specific roles they can play and the competencies they need to perform such roles.

Large companies can play the role of an innovator by contributing their employees’ time and effort to Jam Central projects. For example, IBM “donates” hundreds of its employees to the Linux community. These IBM employees write code and contribute to the Linux development in the same way any other member of the Linux community would. They participate in the Linux online forums and discuss the different module enhancement ideas with other volunteer developers, write code to add new functionalities, and test finished code written by other community members.

Similarly, companies in biomedical research, can participate as innovators by donating their employees’ time and expertise. For example, one company that is participating in a TDI project is Inpharmatica, a midsized London-based biotech company. Similarly, several large pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly and Merck are actively exploring opportunities to participate in such community-led, drug discovery projects. In a typical scenario, a scientist employed by the pharma or biotech company would participate as a volunteer researcher in a project—for example, by working on protein “targets” identified in prior research and helping the community advance the drug discovery to the experimental stage. Playing such an innovator role might, however, require the company to make a strategic commitment to the initiative as it is likely to involve contributing valuable and expensive resources (domain expertise, scientific talent, and so on) to the project with limited clarity on any direct economic returns.

Corporations can also promote and facilitate community-led projects by playing the role of an innovation sponsor. They can provide computing, laboratory, or other types of infrastructural support for innovation activities. For example, Collaborative Drug Discovery, a San Francisco-based company that writes software for biomedical research, provides free access to its biomedical databases to the members of the TDI community. This access offers the TDI community members a rich resource to mine targets related to the different drug discovery projects that they pursue. Similarly, in April 2006, Microsoft launched a collaborative initiative called the BioIT Alliance, which aims to unite the pharmaceutical, biotech, hardware, and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multi-disciplinary teams to speed the pace of discovery in the life sciences.¹⁶ The other members of the network include Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Applied Biosystems, Geospiza, Hewlett-Packard, Interknowlogy, Scripps Research Institute, Sun Microsystems, and VizX Labs. Microsoft plays the role of the innovation sponsor in this network by providing both data management resources as well as specific technical expertise to the network members. One of the first projects, the Collaborative Molecular Environment, involves building an application environment to capture laboratory data electronically and enable scientists to annotate it and search for it effectively. The project utilizes the software tools and other technical resources provided by Microsoft.

Although corporate organizations can contribute “free” resources to the community, such contributions are not entirely altruistic. IBM’s contributions to the Linux development project have earned it the goodwill of the community. It has even earned IBM a seat at the decision-making table in the Linux community. For example, participation in the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) allows IBM to not just participate actively in the advocacy of Linux but also influence the evolution of the overall community innovation agenda.

Similarly, Microsoft’s contributions to the BioIT alliance also have commercial benefits for the company. As Don Rule, platform strategy advisor at Microsoft, notes, “We’re looking at the areas where disruptive changes are occurring in the (pharmaceutical) industry, focusing on bringing together proof-of-concept applications that will alleviate some of the bottlenecks we see in the industry. The advances will benefit Microsoft as well as the other companies we are collaborating with.”¹⁷

Conclusion

The community-centric Jam Central innovation model holds tremendous promise as a way to organize and shape the innovation activities in diverse industries and markets ranging from software to drug discovery to interactive entertainment. However, an important issue that we have not discussed so far relates to the appropriateness of this model to particular contexts. What are the factors that determine the applicability of the Jam Central model in specific innovation contexts? We will return to this question after we describe in the next chapter the fourth and final model of network-centric innovation, the Mod Station model.