The Hyperloop and Hyper-Innovation

By now we’ve all heard a great deal about Elon Musk’s new concept, the “Hyperloop,” an idea for transporting passengers in a way that will be even faster and more efficient than air travel. Described previously by Musk as a “cross between a Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table,” earlier this week he published a 57-page semi-technical document outlining the specifications and requirements for building the Hyperloop. Actually, it’s a kind of “design fiction” somewhat akin to a concept car in the automotive category. Not overly detailed, but sufficiently realistic to provoke serious thinking.

I am a big Elon Musk fan, and what’s even more interesting to me about his approach to this innovative idea isn’t so much its engineering, but the fact that Musk has freely revealed the specifications – that is, the technical details developed so far have now been made available to any and all.

What Elon Musk is doing with Hyperloop is freely revealing the results of the research his own people have already spent money to complete. By making the technical specifications they’ve already come up with available to everyone, he hopes that other innovators will be able to improve the Hyperloop, and that all involved will make money, not just the patent-holder.

Free revealing is increasingly common these days, as the speed of innovation continues to accelerate. Indeed, the whole concept of open-source software, from Linux and Firefox to many of the mobile apps and operating systems fueling the explosion in smartphone usage, is based on free revealing.

As documented in Martha Rogers’ and my book Extreme Trust, companies often choose to free-reveal proprietary secrets in order to spur faster innovation in their own category or technology. This was the reasoning behind Facebook’s decision in 2011 to reveal to everyone, including even the company’s own competitors, the technical specs and details for its highly efficient server installation in Prineville, Oregon. Reporting on the story, The Wall Street Journalsaid Facebook’s servers were 38% more energy efficient than previous server designs, and its decision to release the secrets to its own success came even as energy efficiency had emerged as a key hurdle for online companies. But in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “By sharing this, we will make it more efficient for this ecosystem to grow.”

And Reed Elsevier decided to freely reveal the software code for its HPCC System, a high-performance computing cluster technology platform designed and built by the company’s LexisNexis Risk Solutions unit, for similar reasons. According to James Peck, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the company released HPCC specifications in order to “spur greater adoption [and] further the development of the platform for the benefit of our customers and the community.”

As with many ideas that seem new and different in the e-social era, free revealing has actually been a recurrent feature of technology development since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as documented by Eric von Hippel in his book Democratizing Innovation. But interactive technologies have super-charged this concept, to the extent that more and more companies find that free revealing can be very compelling as a way to leverage and accelerate the creation of value from their own innovations. And it’s standard practice for open-source software and ideas to be protected from others trying to patent them as their own, through the use of Creative Commons licenses (rather than patents and copyrights, per se).

Free revealing can also be a compelling option for a company that is sitting on data or information it might once have considered strategic and confidential. Sometimes the benefit of making internal data freely available to all can be greater than the value of keeping it strategically away from competitors. Not long ago, for instance, Best Buy put its data on nearly a million current and former products online for the benefit of software developers, employees, and customers. The company’s reasoning was that these different groups may want to “build a better Best Buy” for the benefit of their own constituencies, whether customers, other employees, or distributors. Sure enough, new Web sites like Camelbuy.com and Milo.com soon sprang up, providing customers with price-drop alerts and product availability details at different Best Buy retail locations.

But in addition to enhanced customer service, Best Buy’s own workers also began using their own time to fool around with the data in order to help customers with their problems. As Charlene Li reports in her book Open Leadership, for instance, one of Best Buy’s Florida employees took the initiative to use the new information to code an app for making recommendations for home theater configurations with the company’s products. In essence, by making this information available, Best Buy stimulated just the kind of social production I wrote about earlier this week, by stimulating the productive efforts of employees and partners alike.

It’s clear that free revealing can accelerate the pace of innovation in many categories, and my bet is that Musk’s strategy will “hyper-accelerate” the thinking about a mega-concept like Hyperloop. But you may have a similar situation in parts of your own business. Might it be time to re-think the merits of keeping some of your business “secrets” secret, at least in some areas?