You can see video highlights below and download the full report here.

Among the study’s key findings:

• Not all innovation occurs in laboratories; simply raising R&D spending (though important) is not enough to make Europe a global innovation leader. A new paradigm — openness — is replacing the old closed innovation systems, based on rigid protection of patents and other IP laws. The strength of openness is that it brings the intellectual and creative capacities of more and more people to bear on complex problems and problem solving.
• Web 2.0 and mass collaboration will reshape the nature of education, science and government. And, they could provide solutions to complex problems ranging from climate change to energy security
• Wherever possible, companies, countries and individuals should embrace open standards as a way of encouraging innovation. This goes beyond software to key platforms for innovation such as the human genome and the energy grid. For example, an “open source” energy grid could introduce new innovation to an outmoded sector and bring greater consumer awareness and a sense of community to making ordinary household and business decisions that reduce carbon footprints.
• Notions of intellectual property are changing and will change even more. Clever companies will manage their intellectual property like mutual funds — with some IP highly protected and other IP shared with the world free of charge
• Europe is uniquely placed to thrive in this new era of “open” innovation; research excellence and cultural diversity are huge assets, so long as countries look beyond national borders and draw more knowledge from global and intra-national innovation webs
• Europe should require 80% of all publicly funded research to be available in open source journals after a short, six-month embargo under the Eighth Framework Programme, which is due to be adopted in 2014. Contrary to some claims, this step would open scientific knowledge up to greater scrutiny, wider distribution and better commercial and social applications.

Whatever epithet you prefer — a  ”shameful, monumental failure” or “BrokenHagen” — the outcome of December’s climate negotiations in Denmark was a pretty bleak testimonial to the ability of nations to cooperate on any issue, let alone one as pressing as climate change.

But Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics, argues that a collective faith in global bureaucracies and nations’ competing self-interests was probably misguided in the first place. As Williams put it in a call hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund today, given an “absence of effective leadership in government and business,” the real challenge is to find the social innovations that work and scale them up.

To be sure, Williams is careful to note that there’s definitely an important role for both government and big business to play.As he says, there’s a growing consensus around the fact that corporations need to be judged by a broader metric of success — and as Nathaniel wrote this morning, there’s also an increasing awareness that corporate social engagement can and should involve skill and capacity transfers, as well as traditional philanthropy. . .

On Monday (Feb. 22), I will be joining Dave Witzel, director of the Innovation Exchange at the Environmental Defense Fund, and Jerry Michalski to talk about bottom-up alternatives that offer a more dynamic way to marshal and fully exploit the collective ingenuity of the world’s citizens and businesses to address the time-urgent problems facing humanity (see announcement below).

Put simply, I will be arguing that we need a new model of problem solving that taps into the world’s decentralized sources of knowledge and capability – an approach that mobilizes not just leaders of the world’s largest nations, but a whole ecosystem of citizens and organizations around the globe. We need to look beyond the borders of nations and think about society in broad, global terms. If the problems are global in scale, then we need to come together as global citizens to solve them. A system erected around the primacy of national self-interests and national sovereignty just isn’t going to cut it for this century.

Here’s the announcement:

Sustainability movements worldwide have created major new institutions and exchanges, from high-level conferences and carbon taxes to national markets and associated currencies.

Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics and its forthcoming sequel, Macrowikinomics, has a hunch these efforts are the wrong way to go about precipitating the broad, deep changes we need if we really are going to change how we all get around, get power, eat, shop, learn, share and make things. We need to rely less on centralized control and more on self-organizing efforts everywhere initiating small experiments and piloting social innovations. Some of these will mushroom into pervasive changes in societal behavior.

As examples of such experiments in progress today, Anthony points to initiatives such as Carbonrally, MapEcos, Global Forest Watch and CARMA for climate change; ZipCar, GoLoco and Better Place for transportation; Crocodyl, The Extraordinaries and NetSquared for activism and volunteerism. The list of initiatives is endless and fascinating.

We’ll talk with Anthony about these experiments, the forces behind them and what they imply for existing organizations. Join us on February 22, 2010 at noon ET (9am PT) for the call:

• Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500
• Code: 267-6815

Of course, the university is among the institutions we are tackling. As a bit of sneak preview, we have a feature article in the Educause Review. Here’s a clip:

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. Many people have written about this topic, in EDUCAUSE Review and other publications. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea. It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Now is also a time of great opportunity, and there is a steady stream of proposals for change. Some say the web enables distance learning and the elimination of campuses. Others argue that we need more technology in higher education or that colleges should be opened up and be made free to all. There are renewed calls to abolish tenure and even to replace traditional departments with a new set of problem-focused disciplines.¹⁰

The trouble is that most of the ideas being bantered about don’t address the fundamental problems with the university or show a way forward. Rather, change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.

Not surprisingly, he was very critical of bankers and financial power brokers who have rigged the system to extract maximum profits for themselves, while squeezing everyone else.

“Globalisation  . . . gave rise to a world in which everything was given to financial capital and almost nothing to labour, in which the entrepreneur gave way to the speculator, in which those who lived on unearned income left the workers far behind, in which the use of leverage, to an unreasonably disproportionate extent, created a form of capitalism in which taking risks with other people’s money was the norm, allowing quick and easy profits but all too often without creating either prosperity or jobs.”

In a more provocative statement, he argues that the entire accounting system has been falsified.

“Our entire system of representation had been falsified: the economic value of a company does not change from one second to another, nor every minute, nor every hour. . .Our entire system of statistical assessment had been distorted, too. In the statistics, we noted the increase in revenues. In life, we saw a widening inequality gap. In the statistics the standard of living was rising, but meanwhile the number of those feeling ever more keenly the hardships of life was also constantly increasing.”

The notion that the financial system only accounts for revenues and profits and not social or well being is not a new idea. But it is not discussed often enough, particularly by heads of state. Sarkozy failed to mention, however, that the financial system also treats virtually all natural resources and ecological systems as free inputs, save the labour required to extract them.

Sarkozy goes on to lament the triumph of market values over democracy:

“By discarding all our responsibilities in the marketplace, we have created an economy which has ended up running counter to the values on which it was nominally based, and to its own objectives. By over-mutualising ownership and risk, we have diluted responsibility. By placing free trade above all else we have weakened Democracy, because citizens expect from Democracy that it should protect them.”

He then warns that, left unchecked, the current imbalances will generate further crises.

“In the future, there will be a much greater demand for income to better reflect social utility and merit. There will a much greater demand for justice. There will be a much greater demand for protection. And no-one can escape this. Either we change of our own accord, or change will be imposed on us by economic, social and political crises. Either we are capable of responding to the demand for protection, justice and fairness through cooperation, regulation and governance, or we will have isolation and protectionism.”

As alluded to earlier, the problem is that Sarkozy doesn’t really show the way forward. He points to the G20 as a source of solutions and new models of global governance. He calls for taxes on financial speculation to help fund the fight against poverty. He demands that the world move quickly to adopt a more robust, binding global agreement on climate change.

All of these things, while necessary, are only the beginning of what is needed. Like most heads of state, Sarkozy tends to see the same institutions that produced the current mess as the source of solutions and stability in the future. He argues for a change in values, but still takes most of the old assumptions about how the world works for granted.

For example, he doesn’t consider the fact that markets may have triumphed precisely because our models of government and democracy are broken. He doesn’t call for a complete rethink of the top-down approach to global problem-solving. He merely calls for the same old elite club of decision-makers, except this time with a few additional members at the table. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the of new models of social innovation and wealth creation that offer genuine promise are fundamentally incompatible with his outmoded vision of the role of the nation state in a global economy. Sarkozy proposes traditional instruments like taxes and legal agreements, when we really need a more dynamic way to marshal and fully exploit the collective ingenuity of citizens and businesses around the time-urgent problems facing the world.

In my forthcoming book with Don Tapscott, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (Sept 2010), we’re calling for a new approach to global problem solving that relies less on central control and more on a self-organizing critical mass of people and organisations working in all sectors to initiate small experiments and social innovations that, under the right conditions, can mushroom into pervasive changes in societal behaviour. Put simply, the world needs a new model of problem solving that taps into the world’s decentralized sources of knowledge and capability – an approach built on a platform of openness that mobilizes not just leaders of the world’s largest nations, but a whole ecosystem of citizens and organizations around the world.

Perhaps the book will give Sarkozy and company some food for thought. In the meantime, you can download the full transcript of Sarkozy’s talk here.

Where most governments build mainframes and buy expensive software, a growing number of IT leaders in government are consolidating computing resources and encouraging public agencies to use free Google services and open source wikis for everything from word processing to performance measurement, to service improvement. Some call it the government cloud, or a g-cloud, but think app store for government—a place where employees can access a vast ecosystem of secure applications and data sets for doing their jobs.It may sound like a no brainer, but it’s an enormous improvement over the stubborn resilience of today’s industrial age models of government.

In the UK, John Suffolk is amalgamating government computing power into a series of about a dozen highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m to build. The new data centres will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities. The UK government will also build its own “app store” for software programs that have been written elsewhere and can be re-applied in different agencies or jurisdictions.

Across the Atlantic, Suffolk’s US counterpart Vivek Kundra is leading a similar charge towards cloud computing. If he gets his way, within five years there will be no department-by-department mainframes or data centers, anywhere in the US government. Most of the information and applications that underpin public office will be run in a virtual cloud of computing capability that stretches across the whole of government.

It’s ambitious, but Kundra has already done it once in a similar role for the District of Columbia. One of his first initiatives in D.C. was to migrate from expensive enterprise platforms to Web-based solutions, in particular Google Apps. From e-mail provision, web-based software for word processing and spreadsheets, to YouTube for video-hosting, the costs dropped by 90%!

Eliminating vast redundancies and dropping costs are among the chief reasons why people like Suffolk and Kundra are so keen on cloud computing. But the ultimate prize is bigger still. An internal government cloud is a crucial first step toward building a more collaborative model of public service delivery that leverages innovation, knowledge and value from the private sector and civil society. But first it makes sense for governments to make sure they are exploiting their internal resources and capabilities to the fullest extent possible. And from my experience, we’re no where near that reality yet.

With some exceptions, most governments still reflect industrial-age organizational thinking, based on the same command-and and-control model as industrial-age enterprises. After all, bureaucracy and the industrial economy rose hand in hand. And during the last forty years, governments, like corporations, applied computers to their work as each agency acquired and built data processing systems to meet their automation needs. You’d think computers might have made things better. But, in fact, old procedures, processes and organizational forms were just encoded in software. Huge, unwieldy mainframe beasts not only cemented old ways of working, they required still greater levels of bureaucracy to plan, implement, operate and control them. But even the most surgical IT experts have utterly failed to resolve the chaos of inconsistent databases, dueling spreadsheets, and other data anomalies that plague most government agencies. The result is that government organizations today are still locked into old structures and ways of working, each with corresponding islands of technology. If you ever wondered why public services so often perform poorly, you’ve now got your answer.

The shift to cloud computing and app stores can finally reverse this trend. If done right, it could save taxpayers billions and help unleash a new era of integrated, interactive and customizable public services. Tough problems solved in one jurisdiction could be readily applied to others. For example, if a local council in the UK invents a better system for aggregating and responding to public complaints, that same application could be adopted by similar local councils across the country, and perhaps even the world. Similarly, citizens accustomed to having to manage discreet relationships with multiple government agencies at multiple levels of government could eventually benefit from an integrated and seamless experience where services are delivered in partnerships that transcend the usual organizational and jurisdictional data silos that have inhibited collaboration in the past.

Of course, there could be problems. Andrea DiMaio at Gartner argues that cloud computing could undermine the the use of open sourcesoftware as IT shops opt for the simplicity of hosted solutions offered by Google or Amazon. Open source pioneer Richard Stallman says cloud computing is simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. Privacy advocates worry that centralized data centres could be become targets for hackers and criminals.

These are legitimate concerns that require attention, but they should not stall the efforts to break down the organizational silos in government that have long stalled efforts to build a more responsive, resourceful, efficient and accountable form of governance. It’s need now more than ever.

Sure, social media is helping to rally people behind the fundraising efforts and there are several examples where a text message to a relative or CNN helped save lives. But what about the bigger challenge in getting aid to 3 million increasingly desperate people with so many injured and in urgent need of supplies and medical attention?

On one hand, an emergency of this scale and complexity should be a textbook case of why collaboration is an absolute necessity. The sheer scale of the emergency demands access to more skills and more resources than one organization could provide alone. Without Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) working along side the World Food Programme working along side security services, you just couldn’t begin to get the job done.

On the other hand, there’s a counter hypothesis that suggests that some of the delays in getting aid into the hands of people in need stem from a lack of coordination between the disparate players that arrived to share the burden. It’s not just that the airports and ports are congested or that there are too few truck to transport it and no safe place to store them. There is confusion about precisely what supplies have been received, and in which quantities. There is also a lack of coordination among aid agencies and other entities about which people and areas to prioritize and how to overcome the logistical difficulties.

Groups such as MSF have complained that the US Army has prioritized getting military personnel and equipment into the country over humanitarian supplies. Others report that logistical disagreements between the US Army and the UN have led to a “situation of utter chaos.” Of course, it has not helped that infrastructures for transport and communications were severely damaged or that the Haitian government was ill-equipped for such a crisis. But it appears that much of the blame for the lack of coordination lies with the relief agencies themselves.

To answer the question I started with, it seems obvious that collaboration will be a feature of many emergency relief efforts to come. At the same time, there is evidently an urgent need to figure out how to improve coordination among the many organizations that can and will rise to help in these situations. I’ll admit to not knowing nearly enough about emergency relief at this point to be able to make serious recommendations about how to improve the immediate situation in Haiti, but a few thoughts seem warranted as we look forward.

1. Such disasters seem likely to happen more often in wake of disruptive climate change. It time the world engaged  in an open and frank discussion about how we are going to cope responsibly with the massive displacements that some scientists are predicting. Entire cities and nations are threatened. So who will help look after the refugee populations? Where will they resettle? How will the victims of environmental disasters be compensated? And, how will the costs be distributed? The questions are endless.

2. In anticipation of further emergencies, the groups that are most frequently involved in relief efforts should agree on a set of emergency response protocols that could help avoid situations where humanitarian organizations end up sitting on their hands because they lack the supplies to do their jobs. Perhaps such protocols already exist. The challenge will be to get all of the relevant players to sign on.

3.  There are evidently huge communications and logistics challenges in situations such as these. Some claim that only the US Army has the logistical capabilities to take a leadership role in an emergency of this scale. But surely with all of the experience, resources and expertise that could be brought to bear on the problem, a group of NGOs, government organizations and companies could work together to create a more open and federated communications and logistics solution that would allow disparate organizations to perform more like a single, coherent entity.

Apparently, the patient proceeded to bring the book to the appointment while still symptomatic. Not surprisingly, he forgot it in the Khan’s office. Intrigued, Khan took the opportunity to leaf through the pages. He evidently found it compelling enough to then go on to submit an article reflecting on how the principles of wikinomics apply to sports medicine.

Among other things, Khan’s BJSM article calls for the discipline to adopt open access models of publishing and peer review and to embrace social media for sharing knowledge amongst thousands of medical practitioners worldwide. Khan also calls for a collaborative campaign to come up with better solutions to the current epidemic of physical inactivity that plagues the world’s most developed economies.

Here’s a few clips from his article:

Openness refers to tapping the global talent pool—ensuring, for example, that potential collaborators from Abu Dhabi to Zagreb have equal ready access to information. It might mean providing data, questionnaires or videos of exercise interventions. Journals such as BJSM can embrace openness in peer review, and, where possible, in providing open-source material. Of course this must be balanced with the challenges of a sustainable business model. Toyota hasn’t popped their hybrid engine blueprints on the Web with instructions on how to make one at home. . .

The Hippocratic oath encouraged physicians to “give a share of precepts and oral instruction” (Wikipedia’s Hippocratic oath comes up first on Google in 0.21 seconds). Hippo was ahead of his time—sharing in wikinomics contrasts with the traditional proprietary approach to intellectual property and scientific knowledge. . .

In this spirit of mass collaboration, for the theme issue (Integrating Physical Activity into Clinical Practice) guest editor Blair encourages submissions from the world over. He’ll oversee open peer review and we’ll work with the BJSM publishers to see how much we can share for free. Let’s see whether this wikinomic approach of “openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally” can contribute to mass participation against physical inactivity.

The Guardian has an exclusive interview with Witty. Here’s a clip.

“I think it’s a significant contribution to give scientists around the world 13,500 new opportunities to start research.”

“It’s trying to create a permissiveness around scientific research in an area where we know the marketplace isn’t going to stimulate massive research,” he said.

“Given that there is only a handful of big companies who focus on malaria, this is a chance to get thousands of researchers involved – just like software companies encourage thousands of people to contribute their new ideas for software – and we’ll see what comes of it.”

The Guardian is also reporting that Witty will announce an $8m fund to pay for scientists to explore these chemicals or others in an “open lab” within its research centre at Tres Cantos, Spain.

Witty has consistently talked up GSK’s commitment to making life saving medicines more accessible to the poor. And, to be fair, GSK has implemented price cuts for drugs in the poorest countries and promised to locally reinvest 20% of any profits GSK made there. But on the question of whether this will fundamentally change the way the industry addresses public health problems, there is cause for skepticism.

GSK’s concessions in developing countries have cost them little and the company has so far resisted calls to extend its new penchant for openness to treatments for more lucrative HIV drugs. Moreover, in Witty’s announcement nearly a year ago he laid out an ambitious plan to create an industry wide pool of intellectual property to help speed up the development of a wider range of treatments for diseases that have long been neglected by big pharmaceutical companies. GSK opened up a portion of its library, but nobody in the industry followed.

That’s not entirely surprising. Pharmaceutical companies rarely share any information, let alone collaborate openly on drug development. Arguably, such a patent pool would be more palatable for competitors if it were hosted by a non-profit foundation or a university (see Drugs for Neglected Diseases, for example). These arguments aside, if Witty’s insistence that his company push the boundaries helps raise public expectations about what constitutes responsible industry behaviour then at least something of value will have been accomplished.