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The Morfeo Project: an Open Source approach towards Open Innovation
Cristina Breña Andrés Leonardo Martínez
(crisbb@tid.es) (almo@tid.es)
http://www.morfeo-project.org http://www.morfeo-project.org
Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
Abstract
Morfeo is an Open Source community whose members are enterprises, public administrations, universities, research groups, technological centers and small and medium companies. They support the Open Source as an effective strategy for research, development and innovation processes of the (software) technology development. The platform software development allows to define feasible open business models and win-win relationships to foster the collaboration. MyMobileWeb, ezWeb, the contributions of CENATIC and OpenFwPA, the Principado de Asturias e-Administration framework released as OSS to the community, are success cases of technological production in Morfeo. However improving internal/external communication, developing tools for new enterprises collaboration schema and afford another companies complex problems such as standardization or entrepreneurship facilities remain as current challenges of Morfeo.
Introduction
One of the main contribution of the XX century to the technology revolution has been the popularization of the collaboration. Internet and its most famous services such as Flicker, Wikipedia or Facebook are outcomes of the collective participation. At the same time these web applications are also tools for collaboration[01][02]. Before of that, the open source communities such as Debian, Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla suite or OpenOffice had defined the model for the collaboration to software development, producing the infrastructure required[03][04] for a world wide community.
However, there still are a lot of complex problems[05] whose only hope is the definition of collaborative mechanism between the agents interested on their resolution. For instance, the management of the research, development and, even more complicated, innovation processes remains highly unsolved. In the other way, also there are some scenarios where still it seems very difficult to define collaboration models, for instance the enterprises collaboration seems very difficult to solve, because the competitive conception of the market. In that context, the pursuit of the solution to foster the productivity, competitive advantage and effective strategies to compete in software market aims to create the open source community Morfeo Project where are involved all the stakeholders of the R&D+i processes.
Morfeo Project[06] is a technological and economic ecosystem composed of enterprises, public administration, universities and research groups, technological centers and industrial clusters, and small and medium companies (SMEs). All its members are involved in research, development and innovation processes of technology production and they share the following objectives:
- to promote open standards and platform software.
- to define open business models base on technology licensed as open.
- to foster competitive markets of technology delivering as a mean to get innovation solutions, cheaper technology production and to avoid single provider¡ dependence.
Each member has its own motivation (cooperative glue) to get involved in the community activities, i.e.:
- Universities and research groups can complement their (more o less) pure research with activities of technological transfer done by enterprises and SME's.
- Public administrations, as big technology consumer and sometime provider as well, need a wide base of technology suppliers/customers and improve their position to define e-Administration standard.
- Enterprises get critical mass to their technological investment that minimize the risk of the platform adoption.
- Small and medium enterprises can participate at the last part of the value chain shrinking the risk of creating new services and products. In other words, the SMEs can access to R&D+i activities overcoming their financial restrictions.
Morfeo Project
At the end of 2004, Morfeo Project was created jointly by Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, a research and development company of the Telefónica Group, Polytechnic University of Madrid and Rey Juan Carlos University. The initiative pursued to demonstrate the viability not only of the use of OSS in the industry but of the involvement of the companies in the development of open source software. The evolution of the community shows how different approaches were taken in order to reach the Morfeo's objectives (figure 1).
From middle of 2004 until the end of 2005: Releasing Open Source Software. During this time Telefónica I+D was aided by URJC and UPM in the releasing process of internal (privative) software projects as open source projects. TidOrb, an implementation of an Object Request Broker of Corba middleware, SmartFlow, a workflow based on Petri Nets, and MyMobileWeb, a framework to develop web contents for mobile device, were released as open source. All these were very mature products with a roadmap near to end and with wide use inside of Telefónica Group. The main goal was to build around these products an (traditional) open source community, i.e. a community compose of software developers with a non for profit participation (volunteers). To do this a community forge[07], that is a collaborative tool for software development, was created. Nowadays it can be said that the success of this strategy was non uniform. While TidORB and SmartFlow were unable to connect with the community, myMobileWeb has currently a few but active community of developer all around the world. The main conclusion of this step was: it is very difficult to merge in the same community industrial partner, without experience on OSS development, with traditional OSS community member, with a prejudices about companies and their needs or interests.
From 2006 until the end of 2007: Building a Open Innovation Community. At the end of 2005 and at the beginning of 2006, the Morfeo Board realized about the difficulties to mix traditional OSS fans with industry in Morfeo. The main problem was a reciprocal distrust: traditional OSS practitioners did not have confidence about the intention of industry and how this would be able to contribute back to OSS community; in other hand, the industry had problem to adopt open source technology both inside of it, to support their business process, and outside of it, to deliver services and products, mainly due to lack of knowledge about the OSS technology and their development process.
So a different strategy was adopted: to build an open innovation[08] community for organizations involved on R&D+i process. In that moment it was critical to figure out the community outcome that fostered the participation of R&D+i stakeholders. So, Morfeo started to build an ecosystem of research and development of innovative technology having sufficient quality to accomplish with industrial criteria. The answer was immediate: the R&D+i stakeholders found a collaborative schema to solve the risky activities related with technology management. As result, Morfeo had to define a set of new rules to foster the participation, new channels of communication and new infrastructure also, i.e. a community refactoring was done to accommodate this new kind of members. This time the results were very different. From 2006 until now Morfeo have incubated a lot of R&D+i proposals. Many of them have had public funding and the total budget has been about 25M€. The progress of the budget can be seen at figure 2.
From 2008 until now: Defining OS Strategies for Innovation. Certainly the previous history has shown how an OSS strategy can be used to create a non competitive collaboration schema between organization. So it was natural to achieve new challenges trying to apply this approach to another complex problems of the relationships between enterprises. Late on 2008, Morfeo members began to work in new problems: the standardization process, the delivering of professional services base on OSS technology and the development of entrepreneurship facilities for SME's. These tree initiatives have received the following name: Morfeo Open Alliances, Morfeo Competence Centre and Morfeo Base.
Morfeo Open Alliance is an initiative to create a consortium of enterprises that shares a common vision on the technologies and their associated architecture. Besides, the consortium agrees on an open specifications and, potentially, open source reference implementations of components in the envisioned architecture. This collaboration model speed up the standard definition, which traduces in a lower time to market and lower risk in technology investment. The initiative is been tested in a specific domain: the service front-end[09].
Morfeo Competence Center[10] is an initiative to foster the development of OSS professional service delivering. The concept of the OSS competence Center was introduced by QualiPSo[11] project as a way to "aimed at helping industries and governments to fuel innovation and competitiveness by stimulating the use of low-cost, flexible, open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems". Morfeo Competence Center is the proposal to get included within the QualiPSo CC Network. The CC aims improve the OSS adoption fostering the development of professional services about OSS technologies that help to shrink the risk of the OSS adoption at the industry. The following figure shows it structure and business model.
Finally, Morfeo Base[12] is the initiative to increase the economic development of SME's. In this proposal, Morfeo is working on the definition of strategies of value chain management under a collaborative approach. As a special case, the community is trying to develop a specific strategy base on the commoditization of software solution (Christensen law's[13]) and translate added value from product (licenses selling) to services (pay per using). This will allow to create a SME's ecosystem around OSS communities.
Structure of an Open Innovation Community
The current strategy of the Morfeo Project is based on a specific community structure. That is because Morfeo Community is not like other open source communities. The fact that Morfeo is composed not mainly by volunteers and individual software developers but research and development process stakeholders. Also, the kind of institutions that are in, makes Morfeo the only one with this structure.
The community is organized in projects and chapters. Chapters are just a bundle of some way related projects. Each project has its own government rules due to Morfeo is quite flexible. In Morfeo Project, you don't have to pay a fee in order to be a member. It only imposes tree conditions:
- Free technology: the outcomes of a project must be free under OSI criteria[14].
- IPR defined: the IPR policy must be defined. So the potential contributors can know the conditions of their collaboration.
- Strong Mentoring: the project proposal must be leaded by at least one organization like an enterprise, an university or a research group, a public administration, a technological center or a SME.
Even for those project that don't complain with condition 3, Morfeo provides a more traditional community knows as Morfeo Bazaar. In any case, to get involve in Morfeo, the "future" member should send an application for project membership in which he has to fill in the project goals, a clear description of the project, the consortium, the license and the IPR policy. After a few validations the project becomes a Morfeo project and the member of the consortium will be from now on a Morfeo members.
Each project has one representative in the General Assembly where the Board reports every year about the community status, its shared roadmap, its new proposal of horizontal services and new projects and members. Morfeo Board is the executive committee of the community. It is composed of permanent member, i.e. foundational members, elected member, project representatives elected to become Board members and consultants, which are prominent OSS professional with advisory skill. Morfeo Board is in charge of to identify new OSS strategies and to introduce new services to foster the collaboration between Morfeo members. Finally, Morfeo Office is in charge of daily activities such as infrastructure maintain, project approval management, communication issues and other minor task. The Morfeo Office reports to the Board providing information to decision support.
Producing Open Innovation technology
Currently Morfeo has different technological project. This shows itself the evolution of the community. So you can find the following types of projects:
- Legacy Project: MyMobileWeb[15] is "is a low-cost, modular, open-standards-based, open source software platform that simplifies the development of top-quality mobile web applications and portals, providing an advanced content & application adaptation environment.". It was initially developed by Telefónica I+D and release as a free project at the beginning of the community. After that, MyMobileWeb has been able to create a community around it. It is leaded by Telefónica I+D and it is one of the few cases of success of this kind of projects.
- Open Innovation project: EzWeb[16] is a enriched enterprise mash-up platform to build the front end layer of a new generation SOA architecture. It is the Morfeo's proposal to the service front-end of the new Internet of the services. It has been developed from scratch in the community environment and there are many organization, SME's manly but also universities and public administration, working together. It is leaded by Telefónica I+D but currently there are other enterprises getting involved in ezWeb technology. Clearly, it is a success case of open innovation community projects.
- Contributed projects: CENATIC[17] chapter and OpenFWPA[18] are instance of contributed projects. In that cases, public administration or public agencies set up a collaboration framework with Morfeo community. They offer clear strategies of OSS adoption or OSS technology to e-Administration implementation and Morfeo offers an active community of stakeholders of R&D+i processes. These kind of project are not leaded by any foundational members but by an external organization that selects Morfeo Community to incubate its projects. Contributed projects are instance of an expansion effect of the community that is seen as an effective environment of technology support.
Conclusions
Morfeo Project has achieved some important success in these years. Morfeo has been able to define an effective OSS strategies to innovation management. It has built an open innovation environment where IPR is base on OSS licenses. Besides, Morfeo is a reference in public R&D+i program. Many of its projects are been partially funded by regional, Spanish and European R&D+i programs. Morfeo is becoming a true environment of technology transfer, business fostering and economical growth. Even although Morfeo started as a Spanish initiative, currently it has an European recognition. Also the Community is beginning to collaborate with Latin American with the new Iberoamérica network office’s incorporation in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay y Chile.
Acknowledgements
This article had not been completed without the experiences, opinions and comments of some of the main contributors to Morfeo Project. It was a pleasure to have an interview with the following people: Pedro Acebes, Juan Antonio Cáceres, Jesús M. González, Álvaro Polo, Marcos Reyes and Roberto Santos.
References
[01] D. Tapscott and A.D. Williams. Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everythigs.
[02] C. Shirky. He comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations.
[03] E.S. Raymond. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary.
[04] K. Fogel. Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project.
[05] Software Engineering Institute. Carnegie Mellon University. Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future.
[06] Morfeo Project Website. http://www.morfeo-project.org
[07] Morfeo Forge. http://forge.morfeo-project.org
[08] H. W. Chesbrough. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology. Harvard Business School Press. 2005
[09] Morfeo Open Coalition for Services Front Ends. http://sfe.morfeo-project.org
[10] Morfeo Competence Centre. http://cc.morfeo-project.org
[11] QualiPSo Project Website. http://www.qualipso.org
[12] Morfeo Base. http://base.morfeo-project.org
[13] C.M. Christensen and M.E. Raynor. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
[14] Open Source Initiative. Section about Open Source Definition and Open Source Licenses Http://www.opensource.org
[15] MyMobileWeb Project Website. http://mymobileweb.morfeo-project.org
[16] ezWeb Project WebSite. http://ezweb.morfeo-project.org
[17] CENATIC Chapter (in Spanish). http://cenatic.morfeo-project.org
[18] OpenFwPA Project Website. http://openfwpa.morfeo-project.org