Background

The concept of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) has developed in concert with the advent of new online technologies that have facilitated this approach (Howe, 2008). There are three emerging models of crowd sourced innovation or co-creation:

1. Crowdsourced competition - involves soliciting ideas or solutions from a wide range of contributors (Afuah and Tucci, 2012; Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010). For example, the Innocentive platform (http://www.innocentive.com/)

2. Community-based competition - some firms have developed dedicated online communities as part of online competitions, where contributors may interact with each other. For example, Threadless (www.threadless.com), Local Motors (www.localmotors.com), OpenIDEO (www.openideo.com)

3. Open source co-innovation – is what some describe as the ‘ideal type’ of co-created value in use. Here the product or service is created by the users for the users. It is both open in the process of the creation of the service and open in the outcome. Examples of open source co-innovation, the most open of the open-innovation approaches include Linux operating system and also Wikipedia (Boudreau and Lakhani, 2009).

In the last decade, open innovation practices have increasingly attracted research and practitioner interest. Pedersen (2010) outlines a number of empirical studies that have demonstrated the relevance of open innovation techniques (e.g. Huston and Sakkab, 2006, Rohrbeck and Hoelzle 2009; Dodgson and Gann 2006; Chesbrough and Crowther 2006) yet others have found varied results regarding the relationship between open innovation and firm performance, thereby concluding that evidence is inconclusive regarding the effectiveness of open innovation techniques. Furthermore as Chen et al. (2011) outline, the shift towards openness fundamentally changes value creation in the business model. These types of open innovation and open co-innovation challenge some of the basic tenets of traditional business innovation strategy, especially the need to have ownership over the resources that are applied to create new value (Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007).

Task

Your task is to participate in an online open innovation platform. You are to participate in the process over the duration of the semester and produce a report and analysis based on your experience, the strengths and weaknesses of these platforms, and open and ‘co-innovation’ more broadly. You are now a researcher.

You need to demonstrate an understanding of open innovation and co-innovation, document your real participation and engagement, and based on your experience and readings, reflect on the implications for organisations such as firm strategy, performance, idea generation, business models, intellectual property protection etc. It will be important to engage several times over the course of the semester i.e. you can see what the public think of your contributions or follow another participant over time to provide a valuable report on how this process works and its impact.