A day at the House of the Estates -- and driving there

Suits

I enjoy hands-on work. But this week, I participated a few workshops. One of them was entitled "Networked Business and Governance -- Something Concrete for the Lisbon Strategy". It was an information society conference organized as a part of the official programme of Finland's EU Presidency. The seminar focused on finding concrete means to achieve the objectives set by the Lisbon Strategy. We were supposed to brainstorm about how to boost innovation and the utilization of innovation in Europe.

The seminar was opened by the prime minister of Finland -- I wore a dark suit. And the venue was pretty cool, too. Anywhoo ....

Opportunities and Challenges

I had a short slot to explain
-open source
-its opportunities and challenges
-and how to boost Europe' s competitivenes
for people who didn't necessarily know what "source code" means. It is always good to try to summarize your thoughts in a few bullets. And try keep them understandable for everybody. So these were my bullets about the opportunities and challenges of boosting innovation with open source:

Opportunities

• Extend the work of others and concentrate on value add, differentiation, and innovation
• Utilize global workforce and top talents through peer-to-peer collaboration
• Common global language between industry and academia
• A disruption in technology creation -- is changing the fundamentals of software creation
• An even competitive landscape in software -- Europe well positioned in open source

Challenges

• Open source is an innovation platform -- how can the innovator benefit from open source innovation?
• IPR and legal situation not fully clear
• Business models not yet fully developed
• Open source development is distributed by nature -- how do big enough homogenious platforms emerge to enable large scale business?
• Business players entering to open source -- impact unknown
• How much there is hype around open source?

Such short bullets are flammable. Without explanations, they may be misunderstood. So go ahead and do so ;-) You can also read one of my earlier post to pour gas on fire.

Getting there

Talking about gas. I used some help navigating there. The vehicle that my 770 is attached to uses about 20 l / 100 km -- but don't worry. It will work in a Fiat, too.