As companies reach beyond their boundaries to find and develop ideas, they are exploring new models to manage innovation. In projects that tap external talent, questions arise about process management, intellectual-property rights and the right to make decisions. Some executives have been at this game longer than others.
Mitchell Baker, chairman and former chief executive officer of Mozilla Corporation, has devoted the past ten years to leading an effort that relies extensively on people outside her company, not just for creative ideas, but also to develop products and make decisions. The result: Mozilla’s Firefox browser, with 150 million users, has become a rival of Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer.
As Firefox flourished, the process that created it became a model for participatory, open-source collaboration. Baker’s role, central from the beginning, has taken many twists and turns. Ten years ago, she was a software lawyer at Netscape Communications, which developed the original commercial Web browser. Baker’s interest in defining and managing the project quickly earned her a place as one of its leaders. She continued to guide the project after Netscape was acquired by AOL, led the subsequent spin-off to develop the next-generation Firefox browser and presided over Firefox’s impressive growth. In her role as “chief lizard wrangler,” she balanced and blended Mozilla’s commercial needs with the efforts of an army of volunteers who develop the code and distribute the browser.
Over the years, Baker has helped define the legal and functional model that allows an open-source community and a corporation to share responsibility for product development while managing the project and maintaining the organisation’s momentum. Today, the organisation’s open-source development model is a visible and well-tested experiment in managing innovation beyond corporate borders.
To learn more about that model, McKinsey director Lenny Mendonca and Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, met with Baker in her office. Excerpts...
McKinsey Quarterly: Mozilla’s real contribution is the model of participation. How do you manage participation in this environment?
Mitchell Baker: Our mission is about keeping the Internet safe and open and also about building participation. We do that by setting up frameworks where people can get involved in a very decentralised fashion. We attract people who care about those things and they go off and participate in the mission in a very decentralised way.
If you’re touching code that goes into Firefox, the process is very disciplined. But there are lots of areas for participation, whether it’s building an extension or localising the product, that don’t need that degree of discipline. A key point is for people to “own” what they are doing, not in a financial or legal sense but in an emotionally committed sense.
MQ: How much of Firefox’s success depends on people you employ as opposed to the group of volunteers?
Baker: I’d say we need both to be successful. If you took away our employees, we’d be a good open-source project but nothing like a force on the Internet. If you took away the volunteers, we would die.
On Firefox, for example, 40 percent of the code is not from employees and that’s after a recent batch of hires from our volunteer community over the past year. We had 25 employees two years ago and now have more than 120.
Actually, people can make a contribution without being either employees or members of our volunteer community. Firefox has about 150 million users worldwide and since it doesn’t ship on new machines, it takes those many individual decisions to use it.
MQ: How do you motivate people to contribute?
Baker: I think for the people who have kept Mozilla alive, the desire to maintain an open and participatory Internet has been very important. Years ago, we could see that there was some risk of people not being able to reach the Web except through a browser that was part of a business plan. By the year 2000, we were seeing pop-up ads, spyware and other things that slowed down the computer. I think this was an abuse of the consumer but it is a perfectly rational business decision for some companies to do that without considering it evil. But many people feel there should be an alternative and that dedication to an open Internet has helped us.
Second, our product makes a giant difference in the lives of our volunteers and they take ownership of it. I don’t know if you could build this degree of motivation for something that really didn’t change people’s lives, something that they weren’t emotionally committed to.
We see ourselves as part of a community, some of which is inside the organisation and some that is outside it. So that means it’s very much a two-way street and if we start to think of ourselves as the centre, we will fail. We also are extremely sensitive to community criticisms and desires. So when some significant part of the community gets upset, we pay a lot of attention. Sometimes our responses are defensive, but I think we’re pretty good at opening up. We also try to be very low spin.
MQ: What’s your role in enabling innovation in the communities?
Baker: Sometimes, just giving people permission does wonders. Consider our quality control process. We have a public process for finding, tracking and correcting bugs in the code we’re developing and thousands of people are involved. When several people within the community began to take leadership in that effort, someone who worked with me said, “All we need to do is tell these people that it’s OK.” So that’s what we did. And after that, he became our release driver.
Second, we create scaffolding for people to work from, so that even if we’re not innovating ourselves, other people can.
Third, we’ve assembled a set of people here who are really motivated by seeing other people do interesting things.
MQ: Has the culture of the open-source group changed the culture of the core organisation over time?
Baker: I think we were born out of that organisation. I would say it infused us from the beginning because even back at Netscape, leadership had nothing to do with employment status. In fact, sometimes the managers of our project members were demanding that they do things very contrary to what we at Mozilla thought should happen.
MQ: Looking ahead, what do you worry about for Firefox?
Baker: That Firefox is only a part of what’s necessary for the Internet to remain open and participatory. There’s so much value and revenue in the Internet that it makes economic sense for companies to try to create proprietary places there. Firefox needs to remain strong enough and innovative enough that we’re able to continue to show the industry that you can give people control or choice in an elegant manner and still be a professional vendor and that there are revenue opportunities in this. That’s my greatest concern.
MQ: What can other leaders learn from the Mozilla project?
Baker: Turning people loose 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.
Second, figure out where you want input. There are different varieties of input and user-generated content. Figuring out what you really want is very important. If you’re doing one thing and sending out a message that you’re doing another, I think you’re dead.
Third, look hard at whether there are areas where you can give up some control. If you can’t, then stay away from this type of model.
The idea that a single individual is the best decision maker and should have ultimate control works only sometimes. When you ask people to stop what they are doing, you lose their creative thought. This approach can get even harder when that person shows that you’re making a mistake. In a lot of places, people don’t really admit their mistake, which I think is delusional because we all know that no one’s perfect.
McKinsey Quarterly
