Open Bussines

Documento de Lectura No. 1
Fundamentos de Administración UNICIENCIA Hernán Alberto Cuervo Colorado Hernan.cuervocolorado@gmail.com
Cibergrafia 25 de Julio 2009 http://www.negociosabiertos.com/2009/05/31/mas-sobre-el-concepto-de-negocios-abiertos/

by Eli Gothill; on November 26, 2008 in Concepts and Values Tags: business, economy, open, open_business, reputation, sharing, web2.0. This postprovides a broad overview of the concept of Open Business. I will be adding more in-depth articles about particular points and linking them back to the relevant sections as I go along. Enjoy. What is an open business? An open business is a business which depends on non-exclusive transactions with people outside of it. No business could be completely open. If it were, it would have no commercialactivity, and wouldn’t be a business. No business could be completely closed either: the ability of a business to transact on an exclusive basis also depends on its ability to share information non-exclusively, most obviously about its products and services to prospective customers. So all businesses, in reality, have some balance of open and closed transactions with the outside world. Two things arecurrently occurring on the web: the first is that businesses which were formerly more closed are opening up. They are learning to take in resources, expertise and information from outside, through open transactions on the web. They are also learning to give things back to the community around them, for free. The second is that new businesses are cropping up, which are modelled on the very idea ofopenness: this is a business in which open transactions are a central part of their revenue model, or an ‘open business.’ Many dimensions of open An open transaction is a non-exclusive transaction. A business which transacts openly puts no restriction on who can engage in the transaction. This might be sharing data, or receiving feedback on products. Either way, when there is the possibility of abusiness sharing information, services and expertise rather than selling them, it is engaging in non-exclusive, external transactions. The particular feature of a non-exclusive transaction is that anyone can come and take part in it, if they want to. This tends to ensure that the right kind of people show up at the door:

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the customers who have valuable information to share about aproduct, or the community of programmers who can make good use of a company’s open source software offerings. The new era of open business is riding on the back of the web’s massive expansion and proliferation, in particular the last stage of the web’s evolution into a user-generated content platform. It is now easier and cheaper than it has ever been for companies and people to share information andservices with each other. As barriers to openness have lowered, the motivation to be open has risen. At the crossover point, companies have started to catch on to the idea: openness is set to become a new norm of 21st Century business, and will become part of the popular conception of a business and what it does. Business is changing. Open business is a multi-dimensional idea. Transactions can beopen at two ends of a business: what it takes in (inputs) and what it puts out (output.) Some open businesses emphasise the input side, while others are only open at output. Transparency about internal operations is another open business concept. Many successfully combine several approaches. The purpose of this article is to give a broad idea of the different dimensions of openness in business.Open-in An open-in business taps into external value by opening up part of its internal operations to external influence or participation. Business operations which would normally be confined to internal planners are opened up on a non-exclusive basis: anyone can in principle contribute. Some will incentivise contributions with rewards, while others can rely on the willingness of others to get...