Terms and Conditions (and Definitions)

Last week, we started to look at the idea of Collaborative Outsourcing and 2.0 and how these two concepts may be beneficial to the biotechnology industry. But for today, I would like to go back to basics and define exactly what I mean by these and some other pieces of terminology we will be using over the next few weeks. 

Having clear definitions is an important lesson I learned during my Ph.D. studies whilst working with the interesting physiological group of microbes termed Viable But Non Culturable (VBNC), bacteria (Gram Negative pathogens in particular) which lose the ability to be cultured on artificial media but still retain the ability to replicate and cause disease. This is one of those polarized fields where one does not have the luxury of fence-sitting while the "war" between the VBNC and Sublethally Injured groups rages on. It amused me how simply applying a definition to a concept can so easily avoid the needless vehemence of opinion … and if you’re interested, I would be only too pleased to share with you why I am now more in favour of the term (metabolically) Active But Non Culturable (ABNC)! But I digress ...

So, in the immortal words of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music … “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

Web 2.0 was first introduced in 1995 as a term at a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International in an effort to analyze the Dot Com market collapse. The outcome observation of this meeting was that rather than having dire consequences, the collapse seemed to have created an entirely new niche market for the individual to access technology and personalize it. O’Reilly Media Founder and CEO, Tim O’Reilly, has subsequently made an effort to define the concept of Web 2.0 because, in his own words, “A lot of what I'm trying to do with my thinking on Web 2.0 is to make the rules apparent to everyone, so that the industry isn't blindsided. Perhaps a hopeless effort, but I've gotten some traction...”.

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

Essentially, this boils down to effectively using the available technology (namely, the internet) such that it works FOR the user rather than AGAINST the user.

Outsourcing 2.0 is the combination of two recent developments in business modelling. We have already defined the concept of Web 2.0 above, but just how does one arrive at the term Outsourcing 2.0? Frank J. Casale, Founder and CEO of The Outsourcing Institute, has published an extensive report on Outsourcing 2.0 and I could not hope to improve on his authoring. However, allow me to extract some nuggets that will hopefully allow us to bring clarity to this concept. The initial driving force behind outsourcing was purely financial: Can a business save money by relinquishing a particular process or product to an external service provider? In this, terms were usually negotiated around a table at board level, the negotiations were tedious, and they inevitably resulted in discontentment at some level in the client company. Enter the tipping point. Mr. Casale gives the following conceptual definition: “Outsourcing 2.0 is not a buzz word. It is not a product or a strategy. It is not owned or shaped by any segment of the market. It is a confluence of this new and evolving outsourcing demographic and the power and capabilities of Web 2.0.”

“Outsourcing 2.0 is about core competencies,” said Gurpreet Dhillon, a professor of information systems at Virginia Commonwealth University. “In Outsourcing 1.0, it was all about saving money. Now, companies want to concentrate on what they do well and outsource what is not central to the business. ”

Collaborative Outsourcing 2.0: real or redundant? I must ask this question, because perhaps many of you are thinking that inherent to Outsourcing 2.0 is the fundamental requirement of collaboration. But I would argue that an inherent understanding of collaboration is not enough, that we must pursue an explicit course of action when dealing with collaboration. It is not enough that we admire the notion of collaboration, we must forge an intimate relationship with it ... and relationships require work! Thus, I offer the definition of Collaborative Outsourcing 2.0 as: “Providing high-end innovation through process interactions of mutual benefit using all means of available technology.”