Yahoo Inc. is set to allow outsiders to create new services on their consumer e-mail program, in the broadest move the Web has yet seen to enlist independent programmers to build a company’s products for it. This is reported by Reuters. Yet another example of companies opening up their innovation pipeline to leverage the available knowledge outside the company.

The goal is to spark development of thousands of new e-mail applications built not only by Yahoo engineers but by outside companies and individuals. They believe that there is more to be learned from the outside, and that Yahoo doesn’t have the capabilities to design everything the user wants. “Yahoo is a very large company but we can’t build every applications that a user might want” says Chad Dickerson, head Yahoo’s software developer relations program to Reuters.
But as the developer blog indicates it is not only the email program that will be opened up, but also other programs. The first public API is for Yahoo Photo’s Developers can now write application that have read/write access to Yahoo! data. Yahoo uses a Browser Based Authentication mechanism to enable third-party application developers use Yahoo data.

Opening up your innovation pipeline is difficult, and in particular for large corporations. Dan Theurer, Yahoo Technical Evangelist mentions:

In a big company like Yahoo!, you need to get input / approval from quite some folks if you want to do something out of the box and open up the company. All that makes sense and is justifiable but sometimes I wish it would have been faster. On the other side, I learned a lot about the company I work for, how big companies work in general, egos, friends and allies and most importantly how you get stuff done that is obviously not on everyone’s “need this today� list.

So what is Yahoo in the end? It becomes a company storing personal data. Just like Google. The difference is that there will be now a growing group of developers, writing programs to use Yahoo data. And as there is more knowledge developed outside a company than a company can possibly develop by themself, I doubt whether it’ll take long before Google also opens up its innovation pipeline. (Although i’m thrilled by the applications developed by Google developers in their Google labs). If not, then this approach might help Yahoo catching up with Google, as it has already proven to be an effective method to revamp your product portfolio (Eli Lilly’s Innocentive, Lego’s Factory and many more).

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 5:17 pm and is filed under News, Innovation, Knowledge management, Outside-Inside Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.