There’s quite a lot of buzz about open innovation and crowdsourcing these days, but what is it actually about? One of the first-generation methods applied in this field is the organization of contests, where a company frames a problem and the crowd basically cracks it in return for a (financial) reward. Examples include the Staples Invention Quest (product ideas), Dell’s Ideastorm (product ideas), Peugeot’s design contest (design), and of course the pioneering GoldCorp challenge (finding gold reserves). To give another example, in the field of corporate R&D, big companies like P&G are actively leveraging communities behind Innocentive-like platforms. Just to give you an idea of the solving power that’s coming from these crowdsourcing platforms: an R&D problem which P&G hasn’t been able to solve internally for about 6 months to 2 years, is being solved in about 76 hours after being posted on Innocentive.

I was really pleasantly surprised this morning to see Nokia also applying this contest model in countries like India, Ghana, and Brazil, more from a grassroots level and specifically focused on new product ideas. The link to internal integration was not entirely clear to me, but it’s a nice initiative in a larger shift from 'user-centered design' to 'enabling users to design'. (To link it back to another lecture as well, Nespresso also organized an online design challenge.)