227/08 Social challanges s the basis for foresight - Gaia

tional PR, which of course helps our small country,
but may not bring so much business benefits.
Openness has proven to be an effective means to
create new services, and in general openness belief
is currently strong. This is largely based on
the idea that the actor who is able to develop the
open and central hubs for activity will understand
before others what the business model is that will
support the emerging activity in the long run.
This model has worked especially well for
Google (but not so well for some others). The meter
for success should be whether Finland has
been able to create significant amount of new
business growth based on the open initiatives, or
gained other measurable indirect benefits, such
as significantly raising the local knowledge level.
This latter may be a suitable criteria to assess the
importance of Linux on Finland.
Open models of knowledge creation and innovation
take time as there a strong cultural shift that needs to
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Figure 3.6. Detailed roadmap of the open media platforms
take place. User participation demands some form
of openness from the actors anyway, and Finnish attitudes
are positively inclined towards openness.
However, there is a global level business risk, as international
actors don’t necessarily reciprocate with
Finnish openness. We are still in the middle of the
first generation in this shift.
Open platform can be a relevant component to
make the cultural goal of our vision possible. This
has been successfully applied in games business
where the success of many game developers lies
in giving the user community enough tools and
flexibility to tailor the original products and come
up with derived or totally new ideas. Professional
media production can therefore benefit significantly
from user innovations. This can be observed,
for example, in the international success
story of Sulake’s Habbo Hotel, where the interesting
part of the service is user-driven innovation
using simple rooms and virtual furniture as
building blocks for new mini-service innovations
inside the virtual environment.