Crypto. The “dirty word” that means the next generation of Open Innovation.
Open innovation (OI) has been a subject of extensive research for the past fifteen years, since the coinage of the term and formal definition in Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). MIT Sloan Management Review, 44, 8 and has been a subject of extensive research for the past fifteen years, especially after the take off of a platform IOS, or being more straight forward…Apple. Besides the fact that this company alone is responsible for almost 30% of the world’s market share (https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/smartphone-market-share), Apple is not just a simple smartphone company, Apple is a whole ecosystem that made Open Innovation possible for the market.
Now, crypto is a prohibited word among businesses. Covered by the blood of investors, the crypto markets have taken a huge blow since LUNA and FTX crashes (let me know if you want to know more about them…) and now is a subject that must not be talked about.
Going back to OI and looking closer, how Apple made this possible, you can see the development of a whole world around the business. You have the IOS, the design, the technology and you have the devotion of customers.
Apple Store is today a must-go for app-based business, which the 30% fee over the sales, is often a barrier to growth and creation, check the WeChat and Epic Games cases (I will talk about them later, if you guys want it). Businesses don’t want to build over a bully platform, they want freedom for their business making.
Then you have blockchain technology based businesses, such as Ethereum, Solana and many others. These businesses are the new generation of open innovation that creates an environment of freedom for DAPPs business development. This is a new “decentralized” power approach into the open innovation concept, making, in my opinion, a more welcoming and fair system.
I can see 2 possibilities here, one is the whole crypto market being seized for Apple’s kind a company, which is quite interesting to think of, besides the privacy concerns…or, Ethereum ones surpassing Apple as the main source of interactions with apps, but for this to be able to happen, the system needs a hardware like Apples Iphone.
The next generation of mobile users are different and they are shifting. It’s gonna take a while now, but we are going to see the web 3 take over. Meaning, a whole new generation of Open innovation takes over.