Open Minds, Open Doors
Some 17 or so years ago, as a department chair in the
School of Medicine, I was overseeing the creation of new
office space for researchers working in the field of
medical imaging. I suggested that instead of constructing
offices separated by traditional drywall and doors, we
should use movable partitions that would create open
Dilbertlike cubicles. My goal was to foster collaboration
among researchers who might not ordinarily interact.
"Openness begets communication, and communication leads to
new ideas," quoth yours truly, thinking this somewhat new
concept would be instantly adopted by our star
researchers.
Instead, I was inundated with explanations as to why
this was a bad idea, why it wouldn't work, etc. But I was
not swayed by the protests and decided I would win the
argument by simply holding my ground and insisting on the
use of office dividers rather than fixed walls. The day the
facility opened, I proudly walked over to the new building,
opened the door into the new office space, and —
voila! — there were my Dilbert cubicles. Only the
researchers had won after all. They did comply with my
request to use cubicles rather than fixed walls, but the
cubicles were more than six feet high, so the effect was
that they were virtually indistinguishable from regular
office spaces. The best-laid plans... .
While I lost that argument, history is clearly proving
the value of open collaboration in research. In today's
environment, researchers are collaborating not only in open
offices and laboratories but are working across the campus
and literally across the globe. The once well-defined
boundaries separating disciplines are gone, and the need to
assemble multidisciplinary teams of world-class researchers
dictates a degree of openness heretofore never imagined.
Open-source collaboration has been employed
successfully in software development, leading to Linux,
currently the leading operating system for large-scale file
servers. Another excellent example of open-source
collaboration is the Human Genome Project, in which
scientists across the globe enter data from gene sequences
into a common, shared database. The Sloan Digital Sky
Survey is another example wherein large databases are
developed to be shared by researchers working around the
world.
An article in the New York Times last week
described a unique approach to collaborative innovation
used by a defense software company called Rite-Solutions.
Each of its employees is given $10,000 in phantom money
with which to purchase stock in phantom companies. In
actuality, the "companies" are simply ideas for new
products or businesses that employees have generated. Each
employee essentially gets to vote on the worthiness of the
idea by purchasing "stock."
The founders and senior management of the company, now
in their mid-50s, recognize that creativity in technology
companies oftentimes comes from young employees who are so
far down on the organization chart that it is hard for
their ideas to get heard. With this phantom company/phantom
stock idea, young employees have a way of generating new
concepts that can get readily identified by co-workers who
recognize their potential value. About 30 percent of the
revenue of Rite-Solutions now comes from ideas generated
out of these phantom companies. Democratization of ideas is
a way to combat bureaucracy in large organizations that
depend upon human capital for their survival and growth.
Shortly after 9/11, the Defense Advanced Research
Project Agency noted that the investment adage "the herd is
always right" might be put to good use in predicting
terrorist attacks. The agency put together a "futures
market" in which participants could buy in to predict the
next major terrorist attack. We never were able to find out
whether this was a good idea or not, however, as it got
axed, in a wave of political correctness, as being too
insensitive to the victims of 9/11.
Nonetheless, within the concepts devised by
Rite-Solutions and DARPA, might there be the seeds of some
new ideas that could change the research paradigm at Johns
Hopkins? Certainly we ought to be pushing open-source
research schemes as a way to increase the pace of discovery
and lower the cost of conducting research. With the advent
of rapid and low-cost methods of communication, and the
ability to assemble large databases of information,
researchers are already rethinking how research is
conducted in fields as diverse as Egyptology and
enzymology.
Everywhere in the world of information, the walls are
coming down. Success in this new environment belongs to
those who can think creatively and act quickly —
which has always been our strength at Johns Hopkins. The
challenge now is to adapt our world-renowned research
capabilities to the arrival of world-changing data-sharing
capacity. Here's my prognostication: In the future, the
research "business model" of Johns Hopkins may look less
like the NBA and more like a game of pickup basketball:
footloose, fast and effective. In the marketplace of ideas,
that's a stock I wouldn't sell short.

William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.