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Openness. It's a word that

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denotes opportunity and possibilities.

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Open-ended, open hearth,

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open source, open door policy,

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open bar. (Laughter)

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And everywhere the world is opening up,

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and it's a good thing.

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Why is this happening?

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The technology revolution is opening the world.

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Yesterday's Internet was a platform

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for the presentation of content.

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The Internet of today is a platform for computation.

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The Internet is becoming a giant

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global computer, and every time you go on it,

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you upload a video, you do a Google search,

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you remix something,

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you're programming this big global computer

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that we all share.

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Humanity is building a machine,

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and this enables us to collaborate in new ways.

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Collaboration can occur on

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an astronomical basis.

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Now a new generation is opening up the world as well.

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I started studying kids about 15 years ago,

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-- so actually 20 years ago now --

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and I noticed how my own children were

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effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology,

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and at first I thought,

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"My children are prodigies!" (Laughter)

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But then I noticed all their friends were like them,

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so that was a bad theory.

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So I've started working with a few hundred kids,

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and I came to the conclusion

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that this is the first generation to come of age

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in the digital age,

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to be bathed in bits.

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I call them the Net Generation.

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I said, these kids are different.

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They have no fear of technology, because it's not there.

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It's like the air.

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It's sort of like, I have no fear of a refrigerator.

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And — (Laughter)

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And there's no more powerful force to change

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every institution than the first generation of digital natives.

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I'm a digital immigrant.

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I had to learn the language.

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The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well.

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Our opaque institutions from the Industrial Age,

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everything from old models of the corporation,

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government, media, Wall Street,

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are in various stages of being stalled or frozen

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or in atrophy or even failing,

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and this is now creating a burning platform in the world.

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I mean, think about Wall Street.

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The core modus operandi of Wall Street almost brought down

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global capitalism.

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Now, you know the idea of a burning platform,

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that you're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are

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become greater than the costs of moving to something different,

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perhaps something radically different.

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And we need to change

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and open up all of our institutions.

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So this technology push,

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a demographic kick from a new generation

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and a demand pull from a new

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economic global environment

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is causing the world to open up.

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Now, I think, in fact,

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we're at a turning point in human history,

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where we can finally now rebuild

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many of the institutions of the Industrial Age

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around a new set of principles.

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Now, what is openness?

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Well, as it turns out, openness

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has a number of different meanings,

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and for each there's a corresponding principle

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for the transformation of

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civilization.

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The first is collaboration.

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Now, this is openness in the sense of the boundaries

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of organizations becoming more porous and fluid

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and open.

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The guy in the picture here,

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I'll tell you his story.

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His name is Rob McEwen.

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I'd like to say, "I have this think tank, we scour the world

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for amazing case studies."

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The reason I know this story

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is because he's my neighbor. (Laughter)

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He actually moved across the street from us,

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and he held a cocktail party

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to meet the neighbors, and he says, "You're Don Tapscott.

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I've read some of your books."

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I said, "Great. What do you do?"

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And he says, "Well I used to be a banker

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and now I'm a gold miner."

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And he tells me this amazing story.

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He takes over this gold mine, and his geologists

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can't tell him where the gold is.

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He gives them more money for geological data,

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they come back, they can't tell

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him where to go into production.

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After a few years, he's so frustrated he's ready

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to give up, but he has an epiphany one day.

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He wonders, "If my geologists don't know where the gold is,

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maybe somebody else does."

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So he does a "radical" thing.

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He takes his geological data,

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he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet

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called the Goldcorp Challenge.

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It's basically half a million dollars in prize money

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for anybody who can tell me, do I have any gold,

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and if so, where is it? (Laughter)

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He gets submissions from all around the world.

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They use techniques that he's never heard of,

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and for his half a million dollars in prize money,

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Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold.

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The market value of his company

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goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars,

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and I can tell you, because he's my neighbor,

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he's a happy camper. (Laughter)

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You know, conventional wisdom says talent is inside, right?

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Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night.

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He viewed talent differently.

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He wondered, who are their peers?

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He should have fired his geology department, but he didn't.

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You know, some of the best submissions

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didn't come from geologists.

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They came from computer scientists, engineers.

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The winner was a computer graphics company

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that built a three dimensional model of the mine

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where you can helicopter underground

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and see where the gold is.

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He helped us understand that social media's becoming

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social production.

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It's not about hooking up online.

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This is a new means of production in the making.

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And this Ideagora that he created, an open market, agora,

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for uniquely qualified minds,

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was part of a change, a profound change in the deep structure

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and architecture of our organizations,

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and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate,

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to create goods and services,

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to engage with the rest of the world,

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in terms of government, how we create public value.

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Openness is about collaboration.

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Now secondly, openness is about transparency.

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This is different. Here, we're talking about the communication

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of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations:

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employees, customers, business partners, shareholders,

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and so on.

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And everywhere, our institutions are becoming naked.

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People are all bent out of shape about WikiLeaks,

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but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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You see, people at their fingertips now, everybody,

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not just Julian Assange,

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have these powerful tools for finding out what's going on,

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scrutinizing, informing others,

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and even organizing collective responses.

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Institutions are becoming naked,

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and if you're going to be naked,

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well, there's some corollaries that flow from that.

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I mean, one is,

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fitness is no longer optional. (Laughter)

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You know? Or if you're going to be naked, you'd better get buff.

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Now, by buff I mean, you need to have good value,

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because value is evidenced like never before.

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You say you have good products.

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They'd better be good.

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But you also need to have values.

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You need to have integrity as part of your bones

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and your DNA as an organization,

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because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust,

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and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world.

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So this is good. It's not bad.

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Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world.

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Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle

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of openness is about sharing.

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Now this is different than transparency.

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Transparency is about the communication of information.

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Sharing is about giving up assets, intellectual property.

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And there are all kinds of famous stories about this.

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IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software

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to the Linux movement, and that gave them

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a multi-billion dollar payoff.

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Now, conventional wisdom says,

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"Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us,

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and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out

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our lawyers and we're going to sue them."

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Well, it didn't work so well for the record labels, did it?

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I mean, they took — They had a technology disruption,

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and rather than taking a business model innovation

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to correspond to that, they took and sought a legal solution

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and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles

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is now suing children

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and is in danger of collapse.

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So we need to think differently about intellectual property.

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I'll give you an example.

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The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble.

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First of all, there aren't a lot of big inventions

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in the pipeline, and this is a big problem for human health,

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and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem,

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that they're about to fall off something

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called the patent cliff.

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Do you know about this?

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They're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue

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in the next 12 months.

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And what are you going to do,

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like, cut back on paper clips or something? No.

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We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research.

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The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets

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in a commons. They need to start sharing precompetitive research.

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They need to start sharing

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clinical trial data,

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and in doing so, create a rising tide that could lift all boats,

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not just for the industry but

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for humanity.

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Now, the fourth meaning

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of openness,

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and corresponding principle, is about empowerment.

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And I'm not talking about the motherhood sense here.

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Knowledge and intelligence is power,

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and as it becomes more distributed, there's a

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concomitant distribution

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and decentralization and disaggregation of power

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that's underway in the world today.

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The open world is bringing freedom.

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Now, take the Arab Spring.

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The debate about the role of social media

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and social change has been settled.

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You know, one word: Tunisia.

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And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too.

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But in the Tunisian revolution,

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the new media didn't cause the revolution;

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it was caused by injustice.

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Social media didn't create the revolution;

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it was created by a new generation of young people

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who wanted jobs and hope and

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who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore.

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But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration

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costs in business and government,

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it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion,

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and even insurrection

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in ways that people didn't understand.

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You know, during the Tunisian revolution,

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snipers associated with the regime were killing

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unarmed students in the street.

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So the students would take their mobile devices,

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take a picture, triangulate the location,

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send that picture to friendly military units,

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who'd come in and take out the snipers.

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You think that social media is about hooking up online?

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For these kids, it was a military tool

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to defend unarmed people from murderers.

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It was a tool of self-defense.

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You know, as we speak today, young people

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are being killed in Syria,

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and up until three months ago,

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if you were injured on the street,

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an ambulance would pick you up,

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take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg,

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and you'd come out with a bullet in your head.

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So these 20-somethings created

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an alternative health care system,

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where what they did is they used Twitter and basic

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publicly available tools that when someone's injured,

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a car would show up, it would pick them up,

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take them to a makeshift medical clinic, where you'd get

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medical treatment, as opposed to being executed.

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So this is a time of great change.

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Now, it's not without its problems.

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Up until two years ago,

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all revolutions in human history had a leadership,

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and when the old regime fell, the leadership

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and the organization would take power.

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Well, these wiki revolutions happen so fast

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they create a vacuum, and

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politics abhors a vacuum,

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and unsavory forces can fill that,

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typically the old regime,

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or extremists, or fundamentalist forces.

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You can see this playing out today in Egypt.

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But that doesn't matter,

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because this is moving forward.

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The train has left the station. The cat is out of the bag.

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The horse is out of the barn. Help me out here, okay?

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(Laughter) The toothpaste is out of the tube.

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I mean, we're not putting this one back.

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The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom.

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I think, at the end of these four days,

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that you'll come to conclude that the arc of history

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is a positive one, and it's towards openness.

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If you go back a few hundred years,

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all around the world it was a very closed society.

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It was agrarian, and the means of production

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and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge

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was concentrated in the church and the nobility.

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People didn't know about things.

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There was no concept of progress.

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You were born, you lived your life and you died.

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But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention,

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and, over time, the society opened up.

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People started to learn about things, and when they did,

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the institutions of feudal society appeared

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to be stalled, or frozen, or failing.

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It didn't make sense for the church to be responsible

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for medicine when people had knowledge.

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So we saw the Protestant Reformation.

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Martin Luther called the printing press

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"God's highest act of grace."

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The creation of a corporation, science, the university,

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eventually the Industrial Revolution,

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and it was all good.

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But it came with a cost.

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And now, once again, the technology genie

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is out of the bottle, but this time it's different.

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The printing press gave us access to the written word.

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The Internet enables each of us to be a producer.

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The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge.

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The Internet gives us access,

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not just to information and knowledge, but

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to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people

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on a global basis.

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To me, this is not an information age,

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it's an age of networked intelligence.

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It's an age of vast promise,

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an age of collaboration,

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where the boundaries of our organizations are changing,

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of transparency, where sunlight

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is disinfecting civilization,

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an age of sharing and understanding

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the new power of the commons,

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and it's an age of empowerment

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and of freedom.

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Now, what I'd like to do is,

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to close, to share with you

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some research that I've been doing.

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I've tried to study all kinds of organizations

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to understand what the future might look like,

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but I've been studying nature recently.

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You know, bees come in swarms

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and fish come in schools.

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Starlings, in the area around Edinburgh,

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in the moors of England,

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come in something called a murmuration,

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and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings

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of the birds, and throughout the day the starlings

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are out over a 20-mile radius

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sort of doing their starling thing.

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And at night they come together

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and they create one of the most spectacular things

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in all of nature,

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and it's called a murmuration.

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And scientists that have studied this have said

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they've never seen an accident.

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Now, this thing has a function.

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It protects the birds.

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You can see on the right here,

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there's a predator being chased away by the collective power

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of the birds, and apparently this is a frightening thing

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if you're a predator of starlings.

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And there's leadership,

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but there's no one leader.

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Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy,

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or could we actually learn something from this?

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00:15:30,526 --> 00:15:33,582
Well, the murmuration functions to record

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a number of principles,

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00:15:34,945 --> 00:15:36,464
and they're basically the principles that

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I have described to you today.

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This is a huge collaboration.

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It's an openness, it's a sharing

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of all kinds of information, not just about location

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and trajectory and danger and so on, but about food sources.

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00:15:50,493 --> 00:15:54,630
And there's a real sense of interdependence,

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that the individual birds somehow understand

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that their interests are in the interest of the collective.

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Perhaps like we should understand

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that business can't succeed

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in a world that's failing.

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Well, I look at this thing,

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and I get a lot of hope.

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Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring, and

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you see something like this that's underway.

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And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would:

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What if we could connect ourselves in this world

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through a vast network of air and glass?

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00:16:33,935 --> 00:16:36,767
Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge?

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00:16:36,767 --> 00:16:39,276
Could we start to share our intelligence?

390
00:16:39,276 --> 00:16:41,718
Could we create some kind of

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00:16:41,718 --> 00:16:43,439
collective intelligence

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00:16:43,439 --> 00:16:47,359
that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team

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00:16:47,359 --> 00:16:51,507
to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness

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00:16:51,507 --> 00:16:52,732
on a global basis?

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Well, if we could do this, we could attack some big problems in the world.

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And I look at this thing,

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and, I don't know, I get a lot of hope that maybe this

398
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smaller, networked, open world

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00:17:04,987 --> 00:17:08,091
that our kids inherit might be a better one, and that

400
00:17:08,091 --> 00:17:11,404
this new age of networked intelligence could be

401
00:17:11,404 --> 00:17:14,028
an age of promise fulfilled

402
00:17:14,028 --> 00:17:17,058
and of peril unrequited.

403
00:17:17,058 --> 00:17:20,404
Let's do this. Thank you.

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(Applause)