an report about ‘Experiential Open Innovation and Co-creation’

BACKGROUND
The concept of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) has developed in concert with the advent of new online technologies that have facilitated this approach (Howe, 2008). There are three emerging models of crowd sourced innovation or co-creation:

1. Crowdsourced competition – involves soliciting ideas or solutions from a wide range of contributors (Afuah and Tucci, 2012; Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010). For example, the Innocentive platform (http://www.innocentive.com/ )

2. Community-based competition – some firms have developed dedicated online communities as part of online competitions, where contributors may interact with each other. For example, Threadless (www.threadless.com), Local Motors (www.localmotors.com), OpenIDEO (www.openideo.com)

3. Open source co-innovation – is what some describe as the ‘ideal type’ of co-created value in use. Here the product or service is created by the users for the users. It is both open in the process of the creation of the service and open in the outcome. Examples of open source coinnovation, the most open of the open-innovation approaches, include the Linux operating system and also Wikipedia (Boudreau and Lakhani, 2009).

TASK
Your task is to participate in an online open innovation platform. You are to participate in the process over at least two months (from week 5 to week 10) and produce a report and analysis based on your experience and , the strengths and weaknesses of these platforms, and open and ‘co-innovation’ more broadly.

These are the four main online platform:
www.openideo.com
www.threadless.com
www.localmotors.com
www.innocentive.com

Main structure:
1. demonstrate an Understanding of open innovation and co-innovation principles, debates in the relevant literature (see reference list, another upload file).

2.based on your experience(participate in the platform,interaction with community members; ratings; postings/discussion boards/forums;) and readings, reflect on the implications for organisations such as firm strategy, performance, idea generation, business models, intellectual property protection etc(strengths and weaknesses of these platforms). You need to combine the personal experience with relevant literature and high quality reference(journal article)

Tip 1 for this report:
1. You don’t need to document all your individual activities: it is enough that you take a screenshot or snapshot now and then (e.g. once every week) to show some examples, ideally using these to give empirical example/evidence of points you are making in the report. This way you will kill two birds with a stone: showing that you are basing your analysis of the open innovation case with data and demonstrating that you have been collecting data for an extended period of time. My suggestion is for you to take a lot of snapshot of the interaction you are observing (not just of your actions) and then select the most relevant ones, making sure that they also cover an extended period of observation.

In short, you need to show that your report is based on real data, you did not make it up or use fake date. That’s why you need to take a lot of screenshot or snapshot to put in the report to prove it.

Tip 2:

– You may have more meaningful engagement (and hence a better report!) in platforms such
as OpenIDEO, rather than simply rating t-shirts on Threadless
– You may like to strategically select the role you will play in an open innovation process. This
will impact on your analysis. For example:
o You may like to participate in multiple platforms and compare the experience
o You may like to review others’ participation on a current competition (e.g. Local
Motors), if you do not have the specific expertise required (e.g. if it requires
engineering expertise)
o You may like to both contribute to a platform (e.g. contribute content to Wikipedia)
and also review others’ content (e.g. Wikipedia)
– You may like to include a timeline of your participation and significant events/interactions
that occurred during your participation
– You should consider engaging across several weeks – rather than a once off visit to the
website in one week.

Just remember to take a snapshot or screenshot for your Participation and Engagement(important one)