In the basement of a mid-sized factory on the outskirts of Eindhoven, two doors faced each other across a narrow corridor. Both were steel. Both required keycards. Yet what lay behind them represented opposite philosophies of technology—and, ultimately, opposite futures.
Behind the left door was the Clean Room.
Only six people in the company were allowed inside. There, under filtered air and strict access logs, engineers refined a deposition process for next-generation power semiconductors. The real value wasn’t the chips themselves—you could buy similar ones on the market—but the sequence of temperatures, pressures, and timing that produced an unusually low defect rate. None of this could be deduced by reverse-engineering the finished product. It was classic technical information: process knowledge, fragile, tacit, and expensive to protect.
Every notebook was numbered. No USB ports were enabled. Lawyers reviewed employment contracts line by line.
The CFO called this room “the vault.”
It worked—at first. Competitors lagged behind. Margins were high. But maintaining secrecy had a cost that never appeared cleanly on the balance sheet. Parallel teams duplicated work because they weren’t cleared to share details. Engineers hesitated to publish papers, slowing recruitment. And every year, as fabrication equipment evolved, parts of the secret process became obsolete faster than the company could update them.
The vault preserved value—but only briefly.
Behind the right door was the Commons Lab.
This team worked on a different technology: firmware for industrial motor controllers used in wind turbines and factory automation. Instead of locking it down, the company released the core control algorithms as open source. Anyone could inspect the code. Anyone could improve it.
At first, the board panicked.
“If everyone has it,” one director asked, “where’s the value?”
But the value moved rather than vanished. Universities began optimizing the algorithms for new materials. A startup in India improved fault tolerance for unstable grids. A German research institute adapted the firmware for hydrogen compressors. Each improvement flowed back, documented, tested, and versioned.
The company no longer sold secrecy. It sold reliability, integration expertise, certification, and long-term support. The firmware evolved faster than any closed alternative because hundreds of eyes were on it. What would have been outdated in two years remained relevant for a decade.
The Commons Lab didn’t protect information. It protected momentum.
The turning point came during a supply-chain crisis. New manufacturing constraints rendered the Clean Room’s carefully guarded process inefficient. Retooling required knowledge from outside—knowledge they couldn’t easily access without revealing their own secrets. Meanwhile, the open firmware adapted within weeks, updated by contributors who had already encountered similar constraints elsewhere.
At the annual strategy meeting, the CEO didn’t frame the lesson as secrecy versus openness.
She framed it as time.
“If we want value to belong to a few,” she said, “we can keep information confidential. But it will age quickly, and we’ll pay constantly to keep it alive.”
“And if we want value to last,” she continued, “we must let it travel. When many people can use it, improve it, and reinterpret it, the information stops expiring and starts compounding.”
The two doors in the basement remained. Some knowledge still needed a vault. Not everything could—or should—be shared.
But from then on, every new project began with a different question:
Do we want this technology to be exclusive for a moment… or useful for a generation?
The answer determined which door it went behind—and how long its value would survive.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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