This article in the NY Times highlights how recent cases and research suggest that open innovation and crowd sourcing models might not succeed if the model is not carefully designed for a specific task, or if the incentives are not tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. The article goes on to give an example of a custom-based team or researchers and and engineers that worked on a Netflix contest to win $1 million. The team tried for about a year and was unsuccessful in their attempts, and so they went looking for people with other skills and perspectives. Only when they got new help from more statisticians they were able to win the contest.
Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California mentions, "In business, it's not how many ideas you have. What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services."
Do you agree with Henry's observations?
Stay tuned for the all day symposium on 'GENERATE PARTNERSHIPS: Make Open Innovation & External Collaboration Work' at FEI Europe 2010 that will be held on Monday 8 February at the Hilton Amsterdam.