Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker

Innovation is the basic functioning element that works in todays competitive business environment, but innovation is not only about developing new ideas or creating new things. It is all about how effectivelly you frame your strategies and thinkings such that you not only differentiate your self but also make it impossible for rivals to compete or imitate.

The example of such lively inovation is the advent of Mozilla Firefox Browser, with customer base of  150 million users and has emerged as one of the potent rivals of Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer.

Such ideas don't come when you restrict yourself and your employees within the boundaries of organization, instead travel and explore beyond the boudaries to tap the external talent and intellect for knowledge sharing, process management, decision making and brainstorming activities.

The core idea behind such innovation of developing Mozilla and Firefox was not merely producing browser for profit generation but in developing the model of participation. But let me once again remind you that such innovation and modelling was not possible due to the contribution of employees alone,but it included the significant assistance of volunteers, and is intended to be open and participatory always..........

There is one irritating probles related to the release of software browsers, i.e problem of correction bugs. But what happened at Mozilla is a lesson to every organization to diverse their structure and entertain the volunteer participaion in productive manner. Mozilla appreciated the public process for finding, tracking, and correcting bugs in the codethat it developed and got insghts from the thousands of people were involved.

So there is defenitelly a lesson to learn from Mozilla for all of us that allow people to participate in thinking, innovating and decision making, Doing the right thing at the right place and at the right time, and let loose oyur control, were you can,,,,because the results will be great...............