{"id":31046,"date":"2018-11-13T01:18:22","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T06:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/what-would-you-do-with-a-bounty-decentralized-collaboration-on-an-open-innovation-platform\/"},"modified":"2018-11-13T01:18:22","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T06:18:22","slug":"what-would-you-do-with-a-bounty-decentralized-collaboration-on-an-open-innovation-platform","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/what-would-you-do-with-a-bounty-decentralized-collaboration-on-an-open-innovation-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"What would you do with a bounty? Decentralized collaboration on an open innovation platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bounties Network is created based on the philosophy of Open\/Distributed Innovation, a mindset<\/strong> that advocates organization to look beyond their institutional boundaries for innovative solution or industry insights. <\/span><\/p>\n

Many technology firms have leveraged Open Innovation to create <\/span>business models that harness ideas for their internal usage. For example, Apple feeds its users with content and apps created by external developers on its Apple Store. Amazon outsources its tasks to global workforce via Amazon Mechanical Turk<\/a>. Latecomers such as <\/span>Threadless<\/span><\/a> organizes design competition to identify its best-selling t-shirts. As digital technology increases human connectivity, along with a global supply of technical workforce, open innovation has fueled a new wave of platformization, which has grown stronger across all sectors. [1] [2]<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there is an inherent limitation to the platform-oriented business model. As Bergvall-Kareborn and D. Howcroft point out, existing players serve as centralized platform owners that design, control and liason among a Network of external participants. They are the final gateway to consumers, and thus have the final say over who gets to be included and when the game rule gets changed.[3] Besides, there are also issue such as Intellectual Property, Labour, and Payment settlement issues that further complicate the business model. This \u00a0form of tight control has led some scholars to consider such platforms as \u201copen but not open\u201d<\/strong>. [4]<\/span><\/p>\n

A real open network is a decentralized network<\/b><\/p>\n

To solve the centralization issue of existing crowdsourcing platforms, The Bounties Network leverages blockchain technology, a distributed technology that records transaction in a peer-to-peer fashion. Similar to traditional Open Innovation ideology, blockchain advocates collecting and trusting wisdom from the crowd. But more importantly, through tokenization and smart contract, blockchain adds a flavor of decentralization to Open Innovation, meaning that rather than relying on platform owner to dictate the rule of crowdsourcing, users design the mechanism of how each bounty is created and fulfilled.\u00a0<\/span>[5]<\/span><\/p>\n

Specifically, through the Bounties Network, users engage directly with each other on problem-solving, voluntary participation, and self-organizing collaboration. For example, the WWF created a bounty that requires any user to<\/span>\u00a0pick up trash, submit verifiable proof. Once done so, user will receive 10 DAI token as a reward.\u00a0There is no criterion or approval agency that controls whether a user\u2019s bounty is valid or not, nor is there dispute over when and whether a bounty is paid out or not.\u00a0<\/span>Users have complete control over how initiator and fulfiller wish to manage the bounty [6]<\/span><\/p>\n

Most importantly, due to the programmable nature of blockchain, all rules can be written in a smart contract and execute when conditions are satisfied. Audit trail of asset\/token ownership is recorded on a shared ledger to prevent potential dispute. [7]<\/span><\/p>\n