| 22 February 2009
Innovation leads to evolution. That's the claim of Toyota's new campaign: "Toyota Why Not?". Toyota wants customers and interested people to contribute ideas for improving their environmental impact. The flash website is divided into six basic categories: Safety, Water, Land, Air, Community, and Energy. In every category users can contribute and share their ideas and innovations. Other users can comment and rate the ideas.
Is it crowdsourcing? Is it open innovation?
I'm a bit sceptical. A website engine like Flash is more suitable for presentation than for interaction. Personally, I find it a bit complicated to navigate through the website, to rate and to comment.
The website definitely tries to use the concept of crowdsourcing. However, because of the poor usability it will not get a role model for crowdsourcing.
Is it also open innovation? I think it is more a marketing initiative than a successful open innovation community. But we have to wait and see what Toyota is doing with the results of this initiative. An evaluation in some months will show us, if Toyota really uses some of the results - or if it was just another marketing campaign.
In the next weeks, I will present some examples of successful open innovation/crowdsourcing communities. But "Toyota Why Not" will not be one of them.
