In a plain business language, a key performance indicator in research is academic publications; results of research are made public (especially those who are publicly-funded, cf. a blog entry here), available for further discussion and scrutiny. In this context, the research process is (ideally) explained within these publications (in most cases in a separate section in journal articles called research method).
The catch phrase of this era is: publish or perish (we have written few entries on this here and here).
Academics have taken this a step further by experimenting with open-source-peer review of journal articles; the idea of making things public is moving up-stream the “supply chain”, from research results to the actual peer-review.
But what about the process of brainstorming, thinking, synthesising and writing? Here, I am not referring to a description of this process, but the actual doing.
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson has roots in the world of blogging. In particular, Chris Anderson explains how the process of thinking and writing was facilitated by interactions through blogging:
“Given the unchartered waters, I solicited a lot of help from experts in all corners. As an experiment, I worked through many of the trickier conceptual and articulation issues in public, on my blog at thelongtail.com The usual process would go like this: I’d post a half baked effort at explaining how the 80/20 Rule is changing, for instance, and then dozens of smart readers would write comments, e-mails, or their own blogs posts to suggest way to improve it.”
By this, Chris Anderson extends the domain of open source development, object of which has been a particular product or technology (see further the work of Eric von Hippel, for example Democratizing Innovation,
and The Internet Galaxy by Manuel Castells, into the discussion of ideas and progress of research that is eventually published in a book. A very interesting book for the field of SCM, which may be too occupied with developing mass-business models to serve mass-markets. Not considering the long tail!
Now, when is the discussion of SCM about to move into the open-source environment?
Will there ever be a blog or perish? 
Árni
