As companies increasingly recognize the importance of reaching beyond their four walls, there’s an urgent need for implementation roadmaps in this area. Two world-renowned business innovation experts address this “execution gap” in their new book The Global Brain, and help you identify and implement the best network-centric innovation strategy for your company. An inspiring interview with Satish Nambisan, one of the book’s authors and a global thought leader in the field of innovation:

1) What’s the key message or take-away for practitioners?

The key message is that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to network-centric innovation is a sure prescription to failure (in other words, copying what a P&G or an IBM does in open innovation is not necessarily going to be a successful strategy for your company). There are different forms or models of network-centric innovation. Each company has to identify the approach or model that best fits their particular industry/market context. In this book, we structure the landscape of network-centric innovation (i.e. define the different models of network-centric innovation) and explain how companies can identify the model or approach that is most suitable for them and then prepare for those collaboration opportunities by developing the appropriate portfolio of organizational competencies and capabilities. In sum, companies that invest in processes to systematically identify the right network-centric innovation approach and the requisite organizational capabilities are more likely to benefit from such initiatives than those who blindly follow the latest high-visibility example of network-centric innovation.

2) What are the new, important jobs that will arise from this shift taking place?

Several new entities or roles have emerged in this space – each of which implies a new job or a new type of firm.

For example, my book describes a new type of innovation intermediary called ‘Innovation Capitalist’ – a firm that seeks out innovative ideas from independent inventors, invests in those ideas and transforms them to a stage where their market and technical feasibility are clear, and then sells the related licenses and/or patents to large client firms who can take those ideas to market. We are already seeing several such firms all over the world – in US, in Europe, and in Asian countries such as India and Singapore.

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What happens when you invite more than a million students, faculty members, business people and social media experts into a community to help write a book on community best practices? The answer is a lot. But not in the way that you would think that it would. Not even close.

Community Manager Aaron Strout was willing to share the absorbing, straight-forward story behind the new book We Are Smarter Than Me. The story:

Last October, we launched our wearesmarter.org community. It was an experiment really. The goal was to write a wiki book focused on how companies, big and small, were using community to improve their businesses. Some like Procter & Gamble were tapping into their crowd of 500,000 “connector” moms to help sell a new product, Dawn Direct Foam. Companies like Prosper.com partnered with their customers to create a micro-loan powerhouse. Brewtopia reached out to it’s customers (and prospects) to help them create the recipe and label designs for their beer.

The end result is a great collection of mini-case studies with some great “how to” blurbs that are geared toward helping any individual or company get started with their own customer community. The “journey” however, was the fun part. For one, many of the contributors to the project had ideas of their own. They insisted on joining the founders of the project — Barry Libert (Shared Insights), Jon Spector (Wharton), Tom Malone (MIT) and Tim Moore (Pearson) – on the project’s weekly status calls. The founders of course acquiesced and not surprisingly found that the crowd had a lot of great ideas. Read the rest of this post >

This is the 3th part of our series on the best books about crowdsourcing and open innovation. As I probably forgot some books, the floor is yours to suggest other key readings through the comment function below the post. The current list of 12 books can be found here. I look forward to your suggestions!

The last 4 books:

1. Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy
   - by Ron Goldman, Richard P. Gabriel
   It’s a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business.
   —
2. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
   - by Yochai Benkler
   Yochai Benkler shows us how the Internet enables new commons-based methods for producing goods, remaking culture, and participating in public life.
   Downloadable for free: here
   —
3. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
   - by Keith Sawyer
   A pioneering expert on creativity and innovation shows the power of collaboration for individual organizational creativity.
   —
4. The Wisdom of Crowds
   - by James Surowiecki
   While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.

Other parts of the series:

• 12 Books on Crowdsourcing & Open Innovation - Part 1
• 12 Books on Crowdsourcing & Open Innovation - Part 2
• Complete List