Today Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO (pictured below), announced that “all our patents belong to you”. Musk said that in the spirit of the open source movement Tesla will be from now on sharing freely all their patents. Smart move is my take on it. Here is what I told the Harvard Business Review about Tesla’s plan: good for the brand, good for constituting a greater consumer market in EVs thus creating more demand, good for faster industry innovation, good for secondary EV network charging fees, and all the while, without losing Tesla’s real competitive edge: the product itself, which is larger than the sum of the knowledge embedded in its patents.
Posted by Orly Lobel on June 12, 2014 at 08:39 PM