Marketing, Organization, and Financing

Unlike other companies that have a focused manner of development, the open source is less clear-cut. There are mature open source products that perform product marketing, but most of them have no global planning authority. This is justified by the fact that open source is not a business, but an entire business, which moulds to the market itself. The product marketing for the global open source community operates in the way a capitalist nation operates its economy, rather than the way a company plans its products.

Networks of programmers can be formed via the Internet. They can create large and complex software products, and the team increases progressively according to the phase of the development. Software is extremely modular by nature, and thus many people can work on different segments of the software, almost autonomously, if they agree how to share tasks. A good example would be the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution. This system includes more than 16,000 software packages maintained by over 1,000 volunteer developers worldwide.

Open source is funded directly or indirectly as a cost-centre item by the companies that need it. This software is developed in order to use it for other activities, which are the ones that bring profit to the business, so the cost of development is less important than the future use of the software. Such contributors are willing to invest in this kind of project because it allows them to spend less on their cost centers by distributing the cost and risk among many collaborators.

Thinkers and creative people

In a creative organization, creative people must take control. Thinkers are highly needed, as their job involves not only pondering, but also the use, the management, of every kind of thought process. The team should be guided by the creative entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs in the creative economy believe that creative wealth, if managed right, will engender more wealth. Sometimes, workers have better ideas about how to run their company than do the managers, but they can never put their ideas to practice. They have no access to financial capital and their intellectual capital is not sufficient.

There are innumerable obstacles to innovation in the actual corporate environment. Thus, managing innovation is an absolute must. Competition, mistrust, and scarcity of time, money and other resources make it very difficult to innovate. These same reasons make innovation imperative. Almost any major innovation was developed as a response to a problem of some kind. Besides, there will never be a shortage of opportunities to innovate. Historically speaking, a series of innovations have changed the economy of many countries and the world. Most often, these innovations were badly managed (or not managed at all) and had unfavourable or tragic consequences for the people involved with them.

In order to capitalize on the innovative capacities within a company, there are some basic elements that foster it in the organization. The way these elements are provided can be formal or informal, and adapted to the size and nature of the company, but they must be present in some form to truly encourage and leverage innovation. They are direction and alignment between the goals of the individuals and the company, a safe environment to take risks and share ideas, and a compensation system that recognizes and rewards innovation and collaboration.