I'll give you two concrete examples. The idea of open innovation has been popular across a wide variety of sectors. It's being used by Nike, General Electric, and Nestlé. But there are two particular examples in science and technology. One is open-source software, which is a very popular business model for companies to move away from a proprietary framework toward an open-source framework.
On the basic idea, there is intellectual property protection, such as copyrights and often patents, that protect software or code. But rather than using those intellectual property rights to prevent other people from using the same kind of invention, you issue a licence that says other people may use that software if they agree to reciprocal obligations to further share and grow the community.
This has been applied experimentally in the context of biotechnology. There's an organization in Australia called Cambia. They're running BiOS, the biological open-source project. The first step is to make patent information about agricultural biotechnologies more transparent and easier to access, so people know what is patented and what is not. It reduces transaction costs. Then they create a repository of agricultural biotechnological inventions that any entrepreneur can easily access and use if they agree to certain conditions. Some of the conditions may be financial, like revenue sharing, and others are not. We also see universities doing this. The University of Glasgow is an excellent example, as well as North Carolina and a number of others.