Open Innovation

Innocentive

Innocentive is a online business founded on the principle that there is someone out there able to solve a problem you can't solve yourself, and that person is probably willing to be paid an amount of money you are willing to pay. You may think of it as match.com for R&D problems, with money involved.

Innocentive has created a network of experts willing to solve problems for spot payments. The problems are posted by member companies - technology and R&D organizations looking for solutions to particular problems. Cash rewards are offered.

Innocentive is the market leader with this idea - some of the other players will be covered later. Don Tapscott covered Innocentive in detail in his excellent book Wikinomics. 

Here's a question - if you have a particular R&D problem and you put it out on the open market to be solved, via a general purpose facility available to any other company - then how, ultimately, can you protect or create a unique position in the market? The answer usually given is that we do this by combining it with other proprietary features and ingredients (brand, other features etc) only you have, but then that means by its very nature Open Innovation through an open channel like Innocentive is only a partial solution, and is only a solution when the opposite exists as a key ingredient.

Rather than use someone else's community of experts - why don't we create our own? Creating our own community is part of the secret sauce we can then bring to our product development. Proponents of the Wikinomics approach remain happy because it is still embracing open innovation, but instead of asking someone to guide us through the mall, we have developed an inteligence and understanding of the mall and what is available.