Newer examples of open collaboration have been written about and allied with the new-ish concept of “crowdsourcing” whereby an open group will collaborate to solve a problem or answer a question, and the business world has the possibility of a whole new way of working.

We’ve been hearing about new ways for businesses to collaborate and achieve the bonus of “a problem shared is a problem solved”.  Examples range from the Mechanical Turk micro-payments offered via Amazon.com for research services to IdeaBounty, a newly launched brand advertising idea aggregation tool and Innocentive launched way back in 1998 by three Eli Lilly scientists to encourage innovation.

It’s now an independent organisation and sells itself on three advantages

1. bigger breakthroughs
2. faster time to market
3. lower costs

All nicely compelling business case arguments for using the services – IF you can get over the hoarding principle and practice that is common in big business.

Wholly new ideas are pretty rare occurrences – but adaptations and developments of existing ideas and principles are quite common.  This is the basic principle that Innocentive encourages by leveraging expertise while working within the constraints of manufacturing, cost and decision-making criteria.  It sets out two groups of people “solvers” and “seekers” and has cunning sub-groups of seekers for not-for-profit organisations.

Recent challenges within the business & enterprise ‘pavilion’ include insulin delivery for third world countries and innovative male grooming brand communication ideas and in the engineering & design pavilion a “Self Cleaning Handle in a Wet/Soapy Environment”.  All creative challenges needing solutions.

Most participants in community projects like these worry about intellectual property protection for original ideas.  The best sites have strong protection for participants and so participants who offer solutions can be reassured that their good ideas that deliver results are rewarded financially and protected in law (until sold).  Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation is now funding some of the not-for-profit solution rewards.

In a nice innovation, there’s now an internal version of the Innocentive site called Innocentive@Work that can be set up behind a firewall and used much like the much-vaunted Japanese kaizen system which was promoted during the 1990s for continuous manufacturing improvement.  This may be helpful for large organisations where knowledge is siloed or rarely flows between offices and different workgroups.  But our view is that going wider to external groups may get better and faster solutions.

Reporting on the successes so far, Innocentive says the best solutions come to the challenges that are posed and phrased well.  No surprises there.  Good communications is important throughout the organisation and specifying research briefs is no exception.  One user, SCA reported that it got better Innocentive answers when posting problems as a general issue like how to make materials more absorptive than when they cited it in specific terms just for their organisation’s needs.

This would tend to imply that open-source solutions are best for open problems.  I wonder if the corollary is true that for internal problems, those who work in the organisation are best-placed to solve problems?  Would this be death to consultants if that was the case?