Open innovation is valuable because it can harness the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a large amount of individuals, whether they be current consumers of a product or potential users of a website. In order to innovate based on the perspectives of many people, a shift from acquiring the best idea to acquiring idea themes derived from hundreds of ideas from many users or consumers is needed. BrainReactions.net has just launched their first significant open innovation crowdsourcing effort in the form of a brainstorming competition where awards are offered not for the single best idea but for the top brainstormers. In the first few days of the competition there are 500 ideas from 60 different brainstormers. This competition is open for just under two weeks and closes on July 3rd, 2008. This specific competition offers an emerging case of crowdsourcing for the brainstorming purpose of generating multiple new ideas on the launch of a web application, including both marketing and feature development.

This case offers an opportunity to learn about the process of crowdsourcing for brainstorming. This competition has already generated different outcomes than a traditional closed room in person brainstorming session offers or what a contest where “the best idea wins” offers. First, who is brainstorming? Notably there are more brainstormers than in your typical closed room session and they come with and a more global perspective. For this competition, brainstormers come from throughout the globe with heavy representation from the U.S. and the UK. Since most web applications have a global audience and seek the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a wide range of users, crowdsourcing through brainstorming offers unique advantages. Also, new web applications want an opportunity to generate buzz. The brainstorming competition allows this through the marketing of the idea contest while a closed room in-person brainstorm does not because it is more private in nature. The crowdsourcing offers residual benefits, not just the ideas gathered and the ability to validate the direction and decisions through the voice of the user but the marketing of the competition helps to build awareness and launch the web application.

Important consideration is given to what happens before and after the competition. Most of the time spent with preparing the competition actually involves framing the challenge, creating background information (in this instance a free web based video), and identifying questions for brainstormers to generate ideas on. This takes much thought amongst organizers and the client as well as multiple iterations to finalize the questions and background. Alerting the network of brainstormers to begin was the easiest part as BrainReactions has a large network of creative brainstormers who can be readily notified with an email. It also important to consider what the final product of the competition could look like. BrainReactions brainstorming has slightly different desired outcomes then other contests which seek to generate a best idea. Rather than a single best idea, the goal of the competition is to generate hundreds of ideas from many brainstormers so that ideas could be synthesized and analyzed. The themes that emerge amongst many ideas from multiple brainstormers are often times more valuable than a “best idea” and often marketing and product development directions move forward from these themes. After the competition a team of judges with different expertise bases will also spend time at the end to select the top brainstormers based on the quantity of good ideas they provide. Since a goal of brainstorming is to gather a large number of good ideas to synthesize and generate themes around, going beyond just selecting the best idea is needed. This is a current and emerging example of crowdsourcing meeting brainstorming on the web.

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About 3 weeks ago I sat together with Andy Zynga, CEO Europe of NineSigma. For those that may not know the company: NineSigma is an open innovation intermediary that matches the technology needs and questions from companies (referred to as Innovation Seekers) with the possible solutions from a huge network of scientists, university researchers and technology incubators (referred to as Solution Providers). As such they directly compete with other intermediaries like Innocentive, TekScout and YourEncore. NineSigma claims to have the largest amount of Requests For Proposals (RFPs) on its platform and thus to be the market leader. Their clients include companies like P&G, Xerox, Kimberly-Clark and DuPont.

I had a very nice chat with Andy Zynga about their expansion strategy in Europe (NineSigma is headquartered in the US and has already expanded to Japan with a local office there). In order to broaden the current client base in Europe, they are now building up a European Office in the area of Louvain (Belgium). On average NineSigma plans to double its business year by year as more and more companies are adopting this kind of open innovation initiatives. If you are interested in their services or just want to know more, references to the newly founded European Office can be found here.

While there is a lot of buzz about crowdsourcing, there is mainly a great lack of insightful tools to give the concept a meaning and place within existing organizations. As a result, not many companies know what crowdsourcing actually is, let alone they are able to integrate it in their businesses. The IOC-model^TM is a very simple tool that shows how and when crowdsourcing can be relevant by integrating it in your decision-making processes.

In traditional business thinking, there are two viable generic options for performing a certain activity: either you do it In-house, either you Outsource it to a specific party (with levels of collaboration in between). Coase’s theorem provides basic insights in this choice on the level of transaction costs. With the rise of the internet however, transaction costs are lowered furthermore, resulting in a new, third option: Crowdsourcing. In this third option, the task is formulated as an open call towards an undefined, generally large group of people. As such, the IOC-model^TM looks at leveraging the wisdom and skills of the crowd, not necessarily only your customers. Crowdsourcing is bottom-line a new generic option to perform activities/tasks/functions, and should be integrated that way in business decision-making.

How to use this tool? Print-out the figure above, and try to apply it systematically when thinking about activities. For example the design of a new logo: should we do it in-house, outsource it to a specific design agency, or crowdsource it in the form of a challenge like spreadshirt? The content on a new website: are we going to do it in-house, outsource it to freelancers, or crowdsource it like YouTube does for video content? Below, the model is applied to the case of corporate R&D.

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