Although blogs and online journals are much faster to report on the latest developments, books can provide an interesting synthesis of overall trends and visionary insights. As some books on the subject definitely qualify as must reads, I’ve put together a list of the 12 most compelling books about crowdsourcing and open innovation.

1. Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
   - by Patricia B. Seybold
   In Outside Innovation, bestselling author Seybold taps her close relationship with dozens of high–innovation companies to reveal the untold strategy behind the trendsetters and the next HUGE leap forward in customer strategy. Seybold shows that companies that are dominating their category and staying ahead of the pack are collaborating at every level of their business with their customers.
   —
2. Motivation in Open Innovation
   - by Robert Motzek
   Robert Motzek’s study investigates the motivational profiles of user innovators from a manufacturer’s point of view, focusing on lead users and tool kit users. The insightful analysis is supported by two exploratory case studies of Spreadshirt and Threadless.
   —
3. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
   -by Henry Chesbrough
   A new paradigm for managing corporate research and bringing new technologies to market. Chesbrough’s sophisticated but highly readable discussion of these complex issues will give managers much food for thought.
   —
4. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
   - by Chris Anderson
   In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson offers a visionary look at the future of business and common culture. The long-tail phenomenon, he argues, will “re-shape our understanding of what people actually want to watch” (or read, etc.).

The other books will be listed in parts 2 and 3 of this post. When I can find the time, I’ll discuss some books in greater detail.

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Inkling Markets capture the collective intelligence of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future. Typically, a question is posed. For example, “Will the Dow Jones be bought out by News Corps?” The possible answers are represented as stocks. You can buy and sell shares in these stocks to express your opinion on what you think is going to happen. As a diverse group of people expresses their opinion of what they think will happen using this market mechanism (the wisdom of the crowd), an accurate prediction can be elicited.

How can these Inkling Markets be used to address your business problems? You can either build a marketplace inside your own organization, or create a new external communication channel for your customers. The market on itself can be used for different purposes:

• Forecasting performance indicators such as revenues, sales, and quality metrics;
• Fostering innovation by creating a marketplace of ideas;
• Improving competitive and industry analysis;
• Building new interaction channels with customers and business partners; and
• Decreasing risk in managing large product development efforts.

Some companies are already using the platform:

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Do you think Open Innovation is a misleading term?

(The following posts are portions of emails I have sent recently. I will combine my thoughts over the next day or so to write a proper post, but this will start the discussion).

The more I have read, the more disillusioned I have become with what the term is and what it is supposed to define. The definition from Wikipedia being : “The central idea behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm’s business should be taken outside the company (e.g., through licensing, joint ventures, spin-offs).”

When you look at Google or other tech companies, their information is not so much secured by a patent as it is the trust from the user, the first mover advantage, the viral dissemination, and the revenue streams created off that advantage. Facebook isn’t secured by a patent, yet many social networks have come out and are unable to de-thrown them. Doesn’t a patent-less situation force true innovation and business-sense to emerge? See Lawrence Lessig for further information in this area.

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