At $work we have an opportunity to potentially open source a lot of our code, but it will take a huge paradigm shift within the company. It would make a lot of sense from a technical perspective to open up the repos and start openly contributing to other projects etc. But making the actual business case is hard.

Do you have examples of non-tech (i.e. not Google, Microsoft, etc), opening up their code base and becoming better as a business? Bonus points for links to primary sources.