Well, it’s a week after the last Creative Business seminar, and here at ORG Towers we’re still reeling - quite happily - from how successful it all was.

Monday was the full day seminar, which ran from 9am until 5.30pm, and carried on at the pub well into the evening! We were totally over-subscribed, so unfortunately had to turn some people away at the application stage, inviting them instead to the evening seminars. Had we known that so many people would want to come to a day-long seminar, I think we would have run two. We could easily have filled both. As it was, we had about 36 people come, and I think we had a pretty good day.

We kicked off with a session explaining what we mean by ‘open IP’, covering the basics of copyright, open licensing, online distribution methods, and business model archetypes. I’m sure for some in the room this wasn’t a revelation, but it’s always important to lay good foundations for the rest of the day.

We then ran an exercise based on the case of Radiohead’s album In Rainbows, which they released online for free download. We asked attendees to form groups and think about what they would do if they were a music industry stakeholder, e.g. a manager, tour promoter, distributor or fan. How would they use ‘free’ to further their business model?

The next session looked at the importance of community in the success of open IP models - a theme that ran strongly through our case studies. It examined how to build communities, and which social software can help fans to coalesce around people, projects and products that they feel passionate about.

A diversion into the microeconomics of complements and substitutes followed. Whilst a little tricky to explain, the concepts are very important to showing us how freeing up our creative works can help us earn money from complementary products. They also illustrate how important it is to identify when a potential product might be undermined by a free substitute, so that we can create a robust income stream that will resist the ongoing digitisation of creative works. Another exercise got people on their feet again, discussing possible complements and substitutes in different industries.

I was very excited that our three case study subjects, Tom Reynolds, John Buckman, and David Bausola (with Rob Myers) had come to speak with everyone about their experiences. I really enjoyed talking to them and we got some great questions from the attendees too. That was certainly the highlight of the day for me.

We then polished off the day with a final exercise where attendees were asked to take a hypothetical product and market and work out a marketing campaign based on ‘free’.

The Tuesday and Wednesday evenings featured Tom Reynolds and David Bausola respectively, with an hour’s lecture covering the basics from the Monday, followed by a Q&A session with our guests. Again we had some great attendees with some very interesting questions.

We’ve had some really good feedback from those who managed to come along. Jude Umeh wrote about the day on the British Computer Society DRM blog. David Bausola also wrote on his blog about the project, explaining a little bit more about how Where are the Joneses? evolved and the importance of community. And I’m delighted to see that CBDE encouraged musician Neil Leyton to start his own blog! If you have written about CBDE on your blog, please do let us know!
Now that the excitement has died down a bit. we’re focusing on getting the last of the materials up on to the wiki for people to add to or reuse. The case studies are nearly all up, with just Where are the Joneses? left to polish off and post. Much of the material we presented on the day is up already, linked to from the Curriculum page.

Marc Hankins came to all three seminars and has put his photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence. If you have photos, please do tag them ORG-CBDE so we can find them.

Audio was recorded at all three seminars, and as soon as it’s up online, we’ll blog it.

But this isn’t the end of it. We have our wiki, which you can join and add to, and are starting a brand new CBDE discussion list for people to discuss open IP and their own creative business ideas. If you’d like to join in the conversation, just visit the sign-up page and subscribe.

Finally, Michael and I would like to thank all the people who made CBDE possible:

Tom Reynolds, John Buckman, David Bausola and Rob Myers for giving us so much of their time, answering our questions and coming to the seminars.
Chris Adams for design and typesetting.
Jordan Hatcher for working on the intellectual property page of the wiki.
Marc Hankins for photography.
Chris Mear, Matthew Petty and Felix Cohen for recording the events.
Mandy Berry and Pollyanna Lindley at 01zero-one for help and support.

And all the volunteers who have come into the ORG offices to help out, or who have pitched in on the wiki or ORG discussion list. CBDE wouldn’t have happened without you.

Update: David Bausola of Imagination (www.imagination.com) and Rob Myers - the conceptual engineers behind the commercial media production  model that uses Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike as in Ford of Europe’s Where are the Joneses? - will both be joining Tom and John (see below) for our panel Q&A at the Monday seminar

I am excited to announce that we have secured three very special guests for the Creative Business in the Digital Era course!

Monday 17 March
Tom Reynolds, blogger, ambulance technician and author, will talk about his book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, published under Creative Commons licence and in paper by The Friday Project.

Entrepreneur, musician and bibliophile John Buckman of Magnatune will talk about his business, and how to run a CC music label.

Tuesday 18 March (evening)
Tom Reynolds graces our presence again.

Wednesday 19 March (evening)
David Bausola, the creative mind behind interactive online comedy, Where are the Jonses?, will talk about his project.

All of them will be happy to take your questions, so if you’re interested in coming along just download our application form and pop it in the post. Closing date is 15th February, so don’t delay!

The Open Rights Group, in collaboration with 01zero-one, is beginning an exciting new research project, examining how the internet enables creative entrepreneurs to develop innovative business practices by being more open with their intellectual property. Creative Business in the Digital Era will examine new business models and the wider context in which they sit, culminating in one day-long and two evening courses at which we will share our findings.

In the fine tradition of eating our own dogfood, we are developing the course out in the open, and under a Creative Commons licence, using a wiki. But we need your help. We have only a couple of months to do our research, so we need you to help us shape of the course, figure out the format of the case studies, and carry out research. Time is genuinely tight - we must complete all the course materials by the beginning of February, ready for delivery in March.

Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP? We’re thinking of examples like Radiohead letting their fans decide a fair price for the digital version of their new album. Or Magnatune’s use of Creative Commons licences to allow music buyers to sample songs before they buy. Or writers like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds giving away their books for free under a CC licence whilst also publishing and charging for print copies. Or websites that produce an API so that others can build third party applications using their data, such as Google Maps. Once we’ve gathered a list of examples, we will pick a few case studies to focus our research on.

We also need to know what you would want to know about these business models and examples if you were thinking of opening up your information to the world. What questions would you ask? What would you be concerned about? What would you be excited to know more about? Getting answers to these questions will be essential to ensuring that our case studies are meaningful and useful.

This project is about the real world, not theory, and we want people to walk away from the course with a good understanding of what others are doing and feeling inspired to do something innovative themselves. Which means we also need to know about failures. Who has tried an open-IP business model and failed? What did they do? Why didn’t it work? It’s easy for us to be optimistic about the future of such businesses, but we’ve already drunk the kool-aid. In order to convince those sitting on the fence, we need to honestly examine what can go wrong and what can be done to ensure that people pursuing an open IP business don’t fall into the same traps.

If all this sounds exciting to you, and you want to get involved, then there are several things you can do:

1. Sign-up for a free account on the wiki and get cracking!
2. Join the ORG-Discuss mailing list and contribute to the conversation there.
3. Save relevant links to Del.icio.us using the tag org-cbde
4. Follow our Twitter stream

We’re really excited about starting this project, and we really hope you’ll join us on the wiki.