azeem.azhar

Consider this:

Vodafone and Telefonica agreed to share infrastructure in order to save hundreds of millions of pounds of duplicated costs. These companies compete directly in several markets.
LA Times and Chicago Tribune are sharing their foreign desks to save money. (These papers don’t compete directly.)

What the Internet has told us was that sharing could be good–and better still a source of profits.

A narrow conception of capitalism and a rivalrous view of competition drove us into silly, inefficient behaviours. We knew this; and we knew it a hundred years ago with the duplicated build-out of train lines outside of London in the 19th century. Those who preached these simple mantras are being forced to re-examine them.

It has been nearly 20 years since Co-Opetition was published and many of those ideas are to be found in notions of Open Innovation. Open source has been around 40 years. Slowly these ideas are diffusing through our business culture. Kevin Kelly’s End of Control was published in 1996.

The main shifts:

• Personal/egotistic: that we have to own and own entirely
• Control: that we can relinquish control
• Competition: that we have to compete on every axis
• Disaggregation and unbundling: Verticalisation is an exception rather than the rule. Platformisation matters.

We’re seeing tons of entrerpreneurs exploring these dimensions. But what will make a real difference will be when larger firms–who make up a substantial part of the asset base–start to open up.

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