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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I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

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I realize that being a Radiohead fan doesn’t make me unique. But one of it’s benefits is that it allows me to get emails like this one below. I love that this band is pushing co-creation and what it means to collaborate.

To celebrate this week’s single release (we still have those in England) Radiohead have broken up the song ‘Nude’ into pieces for you to remix.

For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, you can buy the separate components or ’stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums) and remix your own version of the song. You can do this by adding your own beats and instrumentation or just remixing the original parts. More information here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/

You can buy the stems here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/buy/

You can upload your finished mixes here http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged and even voted on by ‘the public’.
You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too.

Hope you enjoy it

Does the fact that they’ve broken the “stems” up for easy hacking make remixing any less cool? Not in my opinion. I’m just excited to see artists doing what I hope to see more and more from designers.