Open Innovation & Diggs

              

         

The field of open innovation is nothing new but is heating up with the lunch and uptake of numerous new initiatives.

                 

<!–more Organisations are increasingly opening up their four walls to customers, academic institutions and the general public as a means to source incremental product innovations and branch out into new markets. The following list are Open (or closed) Innovation sites which I bumped into:

www.crowdspirit.com
www.dellideastorm.com
www.employeesuggestoinbox.com
www.fevote.com
www.fellowforce.com
www.getsatisfaction.com
www.innocentive.com
www.ninesigma.com
www.pligg.com
www.salesforce.com/products/ideas
suggestions.yahoo.com

The basic premise of Open Innovation here is to offer a forum facility to post suggestions/problems with digg functionality to bubble the best suggestions to the top. Sites such as Fellowforce, Salesforce, Dell, Yahoo suggestions, employeesuggestionbox and Fevote in an attempt to tap that Digg goldrush enable developers to embed boxes (input box & linked forum) within their site to allow visitors to post suggestions about products, code, projects or applications. These suggestions are then aggregated and voted upon. Such sites are mainly to advance existing products incrementally rather than inventing entirely new products/applications. 

Employeesuggestionbox appears to be the only provider to take the initial idea to a product development stage enabled by the support of project management facilities. Crowdspirit is targeted toward the consumer electronics market (mp3 players, web cams, accessories, etc) with digg functionality rewarding inspired individuals with revenues if products are developed. The long standing Innocentive and Ninesigma is focused to harness the potentials of their academic and commercial R&D relationships to develop solutions for science based products.

Open Innovation in the form of suggestion boxes/forums coupled with a digg appears to be solving real problems, especially for software applications where there are a large number of users. It would be interesting to see how such services could be applied to the fields of politics and the environment!–>