Tags: Acrobat | Community | Crowdsourcing | Initiative | Intel | Sun

Currently, many companies try to tap external resources through (open innovation) communities. Every company tries to create their own initiative and their ownportal. I think, that's the wrong way. Getting attention from potential "innovation solvers" is increasingly getting difficult.

However, companies think that they are better off by establishing their owninitiatives. The war for customer attention in our attention economy has begun!

In my last post I introduced Toyota's new open innovation initiative "Toyota Why Not". Here are more recent examples of open innovation initiatives. Namely from Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Acrobat.

Tags: Community | Crowdsourcing | Initiative | Toyota

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.

Tags: Hype | Open Innovation | Threat

Recently, Stefan Lindegaard blogged about "why open innovation is not just a hype". I would like to extend his argumentation a bit further:

Henry Chesbrough created the term open innovation in 2003. Now we have 2009, and open innovation is getting even more popular (and more mainstreamed) than ever before. A hype would usually get popularized a lot faster (e.g. compare with Web 2.0-topics like Myspace or Second World).

Especially the economic crisis makes open innovation even stronger. Companies are forced to cut costs and open innovation enables companies to save expenses in R&D. If we take a look at marketing practices, we see how good buzz marketing (also viral marketing and guerilla marketing) is performing, compared to classic advertising.

Tags: Chesbrough | Closed innovation | Community | Open Innovation | von Hippel

In November 2008 Henry Chesbrough founded an exclusive, members-only club: The "powerhouse Berkeley Innovation Forum". Major companies like Coca-Cola, Kraft, Philips Electronics and others joined the club for an annual membership fee of 10,000$. Members are meeting privately twice a year and communicate over a private online community.

Their official target is to "share ideas on how to meet research and development challenges across industries". But inofficial it is a direct way for companies to communicate with a top researcher in Berkely and the leader on the topic of open innovation.