Open innovation and crowd sourcing are the hottest topics in strategy and management today. The concept of capturing ideas in a hub of collaboration, together with the outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people or community is a revolution that is rapidly changing our culture. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing explains how to use the power of the internet to build and innovate in order to introduce a consumer democracy that has never existed before. If a business fails to embrace it, it is at risk of being left behind. Written by an international team of eminent thinkers, writers and practitioners in the field, A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing covers the definition of open innovation, how to manage virtual teams and co-create with customers, how to overcome legal and IP issues and common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. With corporate case studies and best practice advice, A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowd Sourcing is a vital read for anyone who wants to find innovative products and services from outside their organizations, make them work and overcome the practical difficulties that lie in the way.

By answering 10 simple questions, TopCoder shows you how to utilize and master Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to maximize your innovation efforts.The 10 Questions asked are:- How do I decide how much money to offer "the crowd"?- How long should my contests run for?- How do I decide and pick the winners?- How do I prepare a project for success?- How do I ensure the right talent is working on my project or build?- How does iteration and subject matter expertise work with "the crowd"?- How do I manage my Open Innovation & Crowdsourced competitions?- How do I accomplish complex as well as simple tasks?- How do we protect Intellectual Property?- How can we truly scale Open Innovation?

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy. The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.

Many technical obstacles to effective innovation no longer exist: today, companies possess global networks that can connect with knowledge from virtually any source. Today’s challenge is to collaboratively transform that knowledge into higher-value innovation. Their book introduces groundbreaking strategies and models for consistently achieving this goal. Authors Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin draw on their own experience building InnoCentive, the pioneering global platform for open innovation (a.k.a. "crowdsourcing"). Writing for business executives, R&D leaders, and innovation strategists, Bingham and Spradlin demonstrate how to dramatically increase the flow of high-value ideas and innovative solutions both within enterprises and beyond their boundaries. They show: Why open innovation works so well. How to use open innovation to become more agile and entrepreneurial. How to access Idea Markets more quickly, and get more value from them. How to overcome new forms of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. How to implement cultural, organizational, and management changes that lead to greater innovation. New trends in open innovation–and the opportunities they present. The authors present many new open innovation case studies, from P&G and Eli Lilly to NASA and the City of Chicago.

Learning from broad experience with open innovation: how it works, who contributes to it, and arenas for innovation from manufacturing to education. In today's competitive globalized market, firms are increasingly reaching beyond conventional internal methods of research and development to use ideas developed through processes of open innovation (OI). Organizations including Siemens, Nokia, Wikipedia, Hyve, and innosabi may launch elaborate OI initiatives, actively seeking partners to help them innovate in specific areas. Individuals affiliated by common interests rather than institutional ties use OI to develop new products, services, and solutions to meet unmet needs. This volume describes the ways that OI expands the space for innovation, describing a range of OI practices, participants, and trends. The contributors come from practice and academe, and reflect international, cross-sector, and transdisciplinary perspectives. They report on a variety of OI initiatives, offer theoretical frameworks, and consider new arenas for OI from manufacturing to education. Contributors Nizar Abdelkafi, John Bessant, Yves Doz, Johann Füller, Lynda Gratton, Rudolf Gröger, Julia Hautz, Anne Sigismund Huff, Katja Hutter, Christoph Ihl, Thomas Lackner, Karim R. Lakhani, Kathrin M. Möslein, Anne-Katrin Neyer, Frank Piller, Ralf Reichwald, Mitchell M. Tseng, Catharina van Delden, Eric von Hippel, Bettina von Stamm, Andrei Villarroel, Nancy Wünderlich

Recent developments of Internet-based digital technologies have revealed a huge potential of developing open, collaborative and network-centred innovation. However, firms face major challenges in using new technologies for rapid prototyping, data-mining, simulation, visualization, etc. to support their Open Innovation strategies.Responding to the need for further conceptual and empirical research on technology-enhanced open innovation, this book provides fresh and topical insights on how firms from different sectors have successfully implemented digital technologies for Open Innovation. Based on rich empirical data, this book discusses the benefits and drawbacks, the processes, the characteristics and the management practices of ICT-driven Open Innovation in private as well as public organizations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, OCSC 2011, held in Orlando, FL, USA in July 2011 in the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011 with 10 other thematically similar conferences. The 77 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the thematic area of online communities and social computing, addressing the following major topics: on-line communities and intelligent agents in education and research; blogs, Wikis and Twitters; social computing in business and the enterprise; social computing in everyday life; information management in social computing.