Hack:
The Mozilla model of Participatory innovation

By Lucus

March 14, 2011 at 4:30am

Moonshots

Focus the work of management on a higher purpose

Summary

With 120 employees, tens of thousands of external collaborators and 150 million users around the world, the ever-growing open-source Internet browser Mozilla Firefox has made itself a model for succeeding in cooperative innovation.

Solution

Without the "impressive" support of the volunteer community behind Mozilla, the browser would have died.

In fact, 40% of the code did not come from employees. Sometimes the company hires from within the community, but there are some people with a high degree of expertise and specialisation whom the company cannot hire, and would never find them if Mozilla were not an open project

The success of Mozilla, which in two years has increased its number of employees from 25 to more than 120, has made it a model for running innovative projects through open communities. This is also due to the unconventional work organisation of the company. The decision-making process is highly distributed and unrelated to employment status, and some of the people who make decisions about code are not employees.

The concept behind Mozilla is "Turning people loose" and it is really valuable. You have to figure out what space and what range, but you get a lot more than you would expect out of them, because they are not you.

If you have a good group of people around you - people you trust - sometimes just stepping back when you do not like something is really valuable. Let the problem play out a little bit.

The idea that a single individual is the best decision maker for everything, and should have ultimate control, works only some of the time

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