Disintegration and Open Innovation #2 – Plug & Play Tech Center

Yesterday, I commented on Wired Magazine’s most recent feature story about the disintegration of industry.

My concern was for the prospects of cooperative or open innovation in a world of small, legally independent organizations.  The most obvious issue is that sharing intentions and know-how is anathema to relatively weak small firms and startups. Even in the Wired article, Charles Mann mentions that one of the budding automobile industry startups in California he interviewed had offices strewn with non-disclosure agreements.

So many non-disclosure agreements have spewed from the printers on the tables that they must be capable of producing them without human intervention.

This is not the hallmark of “open innovation.”

But then I see places like Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play Tech Center.  At any given time, there are over 200 startups living together in this huge, open space.  It is getting to the point in Silicon Valley (not to mention many places around the world, like Germany, Australia and Spain) that if you have a startup to start, the first thing you do after incorporation is get a cube at Plug & Play.

Why?  Because there is hardly a day spent inside Plug and Play that doesn’t have you bumping into someone who can help you – help you solve a problem, meet a potential stakeholder, find talent to hire, get funding.  (The word on the street is that Plug & Play has been responsible for raising over $700 million for startups in the past three years.)

In such an environment, even potentially competitive startups can hardly help getting to know each other, building trust, and learning to be good neighbors.  It reminds me of that Warner Brothers cartoon of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf who punch-in to “work,” fight all day, and then go home friends.  Coopetition is easier when you grow up together in the same house.

So maybe a swarm of independent firms can work together in a collaborative way.  If so, places like Plug & Play provide an important platform for establishing the trust needed to share intentions and know-how across company lines.

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