A recent article on Linkedin’s Pulse raises an issue that many in the arena of ideas and new or emerging business concepts worry about: plagiarism and the concept of “accidental plagiarism.”

In “The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas,” Adam Grant writes about kleptomnesia, or “generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else. It’s accidental plagiarism, and it’s all too common in creative work.”

It’s also common in business “brainstorming” sessions, when people inadvertently or unknowingly repeat an idea as their own. Grant says, “Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.”

This condition worsens when we’re busy, stressed or working on complex tasks. So it would appear that no one is immune!

Thinking about how this relates to the Vested collaborative business model, there’s really no need to need to steal Vested concepts because we share a huge amount of our ideas, tools and resources as open source (YES, FREE!) material.

So this is an open invitation for you to shamelessly steal any and all of our open source material if it will help you or your organization learn and embrace the Vested concepts. I have two requests:

1) When you use our open source material please give us credit. Our faculty, researchers and Centers of Excellence have spent more than 10 years developing and refining the Vested business model.

2) Please don’t take our ideas and put a new name on it. The Vested name and brand stand for something: successful highly collaborative win-win relationships. The Vested movement will grow and become more powerful as people join the Vested movement, versus trying to copy it with their own spin and brand. If you think you can make the Vested methodology better—let us know. If it is better for you it’s likely better for everyone.

It’s easy to join the Vested movement! Start by registering for our open source Vested Orientation course or using our Open Source toolkit.

So join the movement and consciously share shamelessly!

Image: Come in we’re open source by Timothy Appnel via Flickr cc