Joi Ito blogged yesterday about Shinsei Bank’s plans to release their methods as open courseware in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Shinsei Bank is one of Japan’s great success stories in terms of its innovative approach to business; it was this approach, an adaptation of existing industrial engineering methods to the “design of software and IT processes,” that helped to establish Shinsei Bank as a solid international enterprise.

In order to disseminate the methods freely, and to garner feedback and ultimately, improvement, Shinsei Bank will work with IIT Kanpur to design courseware that will accurately capture and relay their methods in the educational setting. In their April 11th press release, Shinsei announced that the courseware will be open under one of the Creative Commons licenses (which license is yet to be decided):

“Shinsei believes it will benefit in a number of ways from disseminating its IT methods through a Creative Commons license. By increasing awareness of its methods around the world, the bank gains access to a larger pool of employees while expanding the number of skilled engineers and technicians proficient in its methods. Shinsei also believes that having others working with its methods will yield improvements and breakthroughs that will benefit all parties.”

By licensing the instructional materials about their methods under CC, Shinsei will add to the growing pool of OCW and OCW institutions—see the Open CourseWare Consortium for a full list of its members. The open courseware will also establish Shinsei as a contributor to and presence in open education, something which ccLearn encourages across all diverse fields of knowledge.