Innovation/Projects/Open Innovation Strategy

MoCo Open Innovation Strategy Project

“Openness” defines Mozilla more than any other characteristic, in both the products and technologies we build and in how we operate.

In 2017, the Open Innovation team conducted a research project to help Mozilla (MoCo) revitalize participation and broader external engagement to be a source of competitive advantage for our products and technologies. The project analysed how effective Mozilla is in its open practices across both staff and contributor communities as well as how other industry actors use openness for competitive advantage. Based upon these findings, the project made recommendations for how MoCo can better invest in and execute on being “open.”

Methodology

In order to begin from an evidence-based, shared understanding of the problem, the project researched three perspectives:

Internal Research

We documented internal perspectives on open source and external collaboration at Mozilla by interviewing numerous employees, particularly those working most directly with communities.

Communities and Contributors Research

This component analyzed Mozilla communities to understand who they are, how and what they engage with, their motivations, and how they’re connected to one another as well as to other open source and open Web projects. This was done through a survey of over 1000 community members as well as an analysis of 16 years of contribution data (Bugzilla, GitHub, and more), which was driven by Bitergia. The research also built on and extended related historical work.

External Research

In partnership with the Copenhagen Institute of Design, (CIID), we conducted case studies of six organizations for inspiration and lessons. Target organizations were Sage Bionetworks, 23andme, Arduino, Aleph Objects, Automattic, NASA, and Kubernetes. They were chosen because they varied in market sector and met selective criteria such as being mission-focused, reliant upon external participation in ways fundamental to strategy and product, and supported by vital, growing communities.

This was the first time Mozilla undertook such a comprehensive analysis of its community efforts, and we expect to revisit the communities and contributors research annually.

Although the project was focused on MoCo, it was run in coordination with MoFo.

Results

Internal Research

Interviews covered opportunities and challenges with external community engagement as well as day-to-day management of relationships and communities. Mozilla employees firmly believe in 'open' as a core Mozilla value and that ‘working open’ can provide benefit to the organisation; however, they described many challenges to working more effectively with participants and communities. A summary of these challenges is that Mozilla has generally not kept up with market developments and opportunities around open, collaborative methods, nor has it consistently and strategically invested in participation and collaboration.

Communities and Contributors Research

Mozilla’s position with community and participation is stronger than perhaps believed. While there are problematic areas – such as an overall contribution decrease in SUMO and L10N, and areas like Web Compatibility where retention and engagement can be improved – the data on actual code contribution is solid. The organization has a very visible industry profile, attracting thousands of global code authors every year (almost 2,400 new code authors in 2017 alone), which is notable relative to other mature FOSS projects. Non-employee contribution to Firefox and Gecko has grown and appears reasonably stable, and the communities around Emerging Technologies projects are growing. In addition, the data show that Mozilla is quicker than other open source projects to respond and act on pull requests.

Mozilla has strived to make its operational processes transparent and to provide engagement opportunities beyond open source co-development, and participation is certainly well distributed across coding and non-coding projects. The qualitative survey found participation focused around events, localization, marketing, and teaching, as well as coding, with most participation occurring later in the product lifecycle. This points to an opportunity to work more effectively with our communities earlier in the product lifecycle. Mozilla certainly needs to work on gender diversity in its communities, but the age and geographical distribution was better than expected.

Other key community research findings include:

• Mozilla often perceives the large group of volunteers as ‘the Mozilla community’ -- as an entity somehow definably singular. However, the research showed that there is not one singular Mozilla community, but many. Differences are related not only to project focus and personal interest but also to motivations, operational norms, social capital and density, feelings of affiliation, and more. Understanding the differences and the reasons behind them is foundational to improving engagement, retention, and providing collaboration opportunities of mutual benefit.

• There are clear gaps in Mozilla’s collective knowledge about its community activities and health. The Open Innovation team is already addressing these areas for improvement.

External Research

The case studies presented a rich set of findings, and despite different products, markets, organizational sizes, and more. They also presented common themes in their approach to participation and external engagement.

The Open Innovation team has been summarizing this section of the project on our Open Innovation blog.

Expected Benefits

In general, this project aims to help us accomplish our mission by improving how we gain competitive advantage with open practices and helping us better match resources and needs -- in order for our actions to have more consistent, market-focused impact.

Benefits include improving Mozilla’s ability to:

• Where appropriate, provide a consistent way of measuring the value of “open” to MoCo as well as to external contributors/communities so we can better align resources and needs and confirm our actions have the right effect. Where formal measurements aren’t possible, provide a consistent way of defining and executing towards the desired market impact
• Make market informed decisions about how MoCo can best be “open”
• Identify new opportunities for competitive advantage in “open”
• Think about how our organizational architecture -- our structure, process, people, and incentives -- should align with what we need to be “best-in-class” open
• In general, build on our strengths and address our weaknesses

Who

The project’s Steering Committee provides oversight and includes:

• Katharina Borchert • Accountable
• Patrick Finch • Responsible
• John Jensen • Director, Organization Strategy
• David Herman • Director Strategy, Emerging Technology
• Nick Nguyen • VP, Firefox Product
• George Roter • Head of Core Contributors, Participation

The project’s Core Team members drive the project and include:

• Patrick Finch • Responsible
• Susy Struble • Strategic advisor & Internal research
• Pierros Papadeas • Open source expert
• Rina Tambo Jensen • Lead researcher
• Ruben Martin • Communities and contributors research
• Alex Klepel • Internal communications
• David B. Schwartz (Princeton) • Researcher

External Partners

• Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design (CIID)
• Bitergia

Timeline

The project launched in March 2017. Broadly, the timeline is:

• End of March: Finalize analytical framework
• April - May: Internal interviews, community survey and research, & external research; also internal communications about any useful findings as the project progresses
• Late May: Synthesis of findings & more internal communication
• Late June: Presentation of project findings
• Starting in July: General recommendations as well as a subset of recommendations which we’ll prototype with internal partners in 2H 2017

How to Participate

If you want to learn more about the project or have thoughts, suggestions, relevant research, or would like to directly participate, please contact the project Core Team. We will also communicate when we’re hosting internal discussions and meetings.

Past Research

This project will be informed by related research, historical and current, such as the D&I study and Open Source Experiments. Please contact the project team if you have relevant research that you can share.

About the Open Innovation team

The Open Innovation team exists to help product and technology groups make effective use of open methods across all phases of the lifecycle.

Our tactic is to prove internally that open methods work.

Our role is to be a centre of competence for:

• Shaping strategy for delivering value through open methods
• Being practitioners of open methods
• Delivering excellence in engaging external stakeholders