Any creative content, for example music, can be shared, remixed and reused, sometimes even for commercial purposes, via Creative Commons licensing without always necessarily seeking  permission from the author first. For example, Bucky Jonson, the band behind the Black Eyed Peas, who has sold over 16 million albums, have recently released their new album under a Creative Commons licence and encourage people to share and remix this work.

But it’s not just restricted to sharing creative content. Computer software can also be shared and developed collaboratively thanks to Open Source software licensing. Open Source software tends to be written for a purpose, for and by a community, who actually use the software. By making available the source computer code, communities can swiftly adapt, improve and develop it for multiple purposes. For example, an e-commerce enabled shopping portal website may be adapted and improved over time resulting in a Content Management System (CMS) that can be used by a business to drive their website, Intranet and Extranet.

Open Source software often evolves at an astonishing pace compared with conventional software development as people improve, adapt and share changes openly adding value over time. Bugs and security flaws in the software can often be fixed within days rather than weeks and the openness and transparency of the source code leads to improved quality in design, functionality and usability.

Due to it’s “free to use” software licences, Open Source can provide cost effective ways to implement CMS and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – quick wins for small businesses when it comes to making tangible savings whilst also improving competitiveness.

Open Source software is not just for hobbyists and small businesses, websites for international organisations like NASA and the CIA are developed using Open Source CMS. Most consumer electronics such as TVs, DVD Players, and car navigation systems use Open Source software and even the search engine giant GoogleTM was founded on Open Source technologies.

Open Source also offers plenty of commercial opportunities for software development businesses choosing to adopt business models that open up their Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and share their innovation. For example, CRM specialist SugarCRM secured approximately $41m in Venture Capital to develop its offerings and Sun Microsystems recently purchased Open Source relational database specialist MySQL AB in a $1 billion deal.

So it’s easy to understand some of the benefits of Open Source – harnessing intelligence, better quality, lower cost, higher reliability, more flexibility, and no more predatory vendor licence lock-ins!

Many public sector organisations are also beginning to embrace Open Source. In 2007 Shadow Chancellor George Osborne admitted that Open Source could save 51% of the Government’s IT budget – which amounts to around £620million a year. And Datamonitor market research predicts that schools and universities will dramatically increase adoption of Open Source software by 2012.

Adopting an open, sharing and peering approach can also reap unexpected results, as Canadian gold-mining company Goldcorp Inc found out when it “Open Sourced” its proprietary geology information and invited the world to help it look for sources of gold from their open data. This Open Source approach and using the Internet as a collaboration medium to harness “collective genius” incentivized by an online competition and prize money breathed new life into the struggling business. It is estimated that the company’s exploration time was reduced by at least two years, while its stock price (NYSE GG), since the competition in 2000 has dramatically increased, following over 8m oz of gold being found mainly as a result of the competition.

So the next time you have a Eureka moment, don't automatically rush to patent it and work in secretive isolation. Stop and think for a moment to see if you can use Creative Commons or Open Source licensing to nurture your IPR, while allowing scope to accelerate your company’s rate of innovation and growth through sharing the idea.