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Open Innovation Success Stories
Many corporations such as Apple, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Philips, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, the BBC and Nokia have embraced open innovation, realizing the benefits of harnessing inventiveness from outside their corporate walls.
Here are some success stories that show how corporations from around the world have benefited from open innovation.
DHL, Germany
International express shipping provider DHL faces a number of challenges every day as it seeks to optimize its logistics and transport activities in urban areas, whilst considering the traffic environ...
Scientific American/The Zooniverse, United States
Marine scientists have launched a global call for help deciphering the language of pilot and killer whales. Currently, understanding of their communication is poor with many of their calls remaining a...
Savonlinna Opera Festival, Finland
Crowdsourcing and open innovation take centre stage with a project to create a full-length opera in an online community.
Since 2010 The Opera by You initiative has been drawing on ideas for music...
DARPA, United States
The scene is a familiar one: a regime on the run shreds all its top secret documents and leaves precious little behind for incoming forces to find. That’s a scenario that provided inspiration for a...
National Education Association Foundation & US Department of Education, United States
Teacher needed a little help in the classroom to solve some of education’s most pressing challenges and so the U.S. Department of Education and the NEA (National Education Association) Foundation la...
World Bank, United States
“One of the reasons we threw open the doors to our data was that we recognized we don’t have a monopoly on innovation,” said World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick. “These apps clearly...
California State Assemblymember Jared Huffman, United States
Most people at one time or another have thought that there should be laws and by-laws where none exist currently, or that aspects of the criminal code that are particularly irksome should be changed.
...
eBay Foundation, United States
According to the World Bank 80 percent of the planet’s population lives on less than $10 per day. In the USA alone, one in every six Americans lives in poverty. These startling figures and the fac...
Smith's Snackfood Company, Australia
For food and beverage companies open innovation and crowdsourcing initiatives with consumers is something of a no-brainer. Many are variants of a similar theme and include Ben and Jerry’s global ...
Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism , Chile
The government of Chile has embarked on a number of initiatives to encourage its citizens to become more involved in entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. The overall aim is to ultimately bre...
X PRIZE Foundation, United States
There’s nothing quite like the lure of fame and fortune to galvanise thinking and when you throw a tough challenge into the mix as well you have a heady and intoxicating combination, as the X PRIZE ...
Environmental Protection Agency, United States
Open innovation and crowdsourcing solutions are being sought to help reduce our carbon footprint and make the planet a greener place to live. In June 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (E...
City of Ottawa, Canada
In 2010, the City of Ottawa decided to embark on a new mission to encourage the development of apps to make living in the city easier. With an overall prize purse of $50,000, the Apps4Ottawa competi...
Unilever, United Kingdom
Having dropped the ad agency for one of its popular food brands Unilever decided to hold a crowdsourcing competition to find advertising ideas for Peperami, a meat snack. The company was looking for ...
Garage48 Foundation, Estonia
Crowdsourcing hackathons are valuable initiatives that can generate volumes of ideas and workable solutions in a short space of time. Typically they are day-long or two day-long, focused team-based e...
DARPA, United States
Crowdsourcing showed its true character and worth as a very effective finding tool in the DARPA Network Challenge sponsored by US government agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
...
The Guardian Newspaper, United Kingdom
In 2009 crowdsourcing helped to blow the lid off the biggest political scandal to hit the UK in at least a decade.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper had obtained the expenses details of all members o...
Carnegie Mellon University/Stanford University , United States
RNA (ribonucleic acid) is one of life’s fundamental building blocks and a key messenger and regulator of cell functions, but there is still a great deal of information that science has yet to learn ...
IdeasProject/Nokia, United States
Can an app truly change the world? That was the question that sparked the creation of a crowdsourcing apps contests organised by IdeasProject an online community founded on the philosophy of democrat...
Ben and Jerry's, United States
Ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's know a thing or two about creating popular flavors, and is well known for viewing its customers as co-creators, valuing and taking note of many of their suggestions and f...
Diabetes Mine, United States
A futuristic modular three-part wearable artificial pancreas, an innovative small, portable insulin-delivery device and an iPhone/iPod touch app to help diabetic teenage girls develop a glucose testin...
New York City Government, United States
Nick Nyhan was driving around New York City late one night and was becoming increasingly frustrated at not being able to find a parking space. That moment of irritation was his inspiration for a soci...
Emirates, United Arab Emirates
Crowdsourcing with customers is not only smart PR, but it can also save a company large sums of money as it doesn’t have to engage employees in endless rounds of meetings to come up with ideas and i...
The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence , United States
To many people, climate change and global warming are among the most pressing and important issues facing humanity today, requiring creative and innovative solutions to ensure the long term health of ...
Waitrose, United Kingdom
In May 2011 a new product hit the shelves of upmarket UK supermarket chain Waitrose. What made this particular item so special was that it was the company’s first customer-created product and follo...
Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, United States
It’s not only businesses that are benefiting from crowdsourcing initiatives as towns and cities have cottoned onto the fact that they can pick up great ideas to improve communities and neighborhoods...
DARPA, United States
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) employs some of the sharpest brains on the planet to develop new technology to be used by the US military. But it does not have all the bright id...
The National Trust, United Kingdom
Crowdsourcing is becoming part of the innovation fabric of more and more businesses and brands. It is not only being used to create new products and services, but also to determine research focus and...
Paul Frigout, Romania
The crowd is a permanently loud presence. Whether we’re tweeting or emailing our opinions to newspapers, broadcasting our own footage across the web or offering advice to retailers we have somethin...
Appfrica Labs, Uganda
The technological transformations that have swept across many parts of the world have also been making inroads into the African continent. For example, in East Africa alone there are more than 50 mil...
Skolkovo Foundation , Russian
To help give innovation a boost in Russia, the Skolkovo Foundation and Cisco launched a crowdsourcing competition for entrepreneurs, students, technologists and innovators who are residents and citize...
Heritage Provider Network, United States
Crowdsourcing is a now a familiar concept on the open innovation landscape with new competitions and initiatives being launched every week. It is all part of a large trend that is opening up corpora...
RHOK, United States
Hackers of the world united in 2009 for the first global ‘Random Hacks of Kindness” (RHOK) crowdsourcing program to create software solutions that make a difference.
Since then the community ...
One Economy Corporation, United States
Leveraging the power of the crowd to create applications for the public good was the inspiring goal of the ‘Applications for Good’ crowdsourcing competition. Sponsored by One Economy Corporation,...
Adventure Ecology, United Kingdom
Nobody is as smart as everybody is the foundation that crowdsourcing is built on, an innovation process that can be deployed to tackle any kind of problem and change the way systems, companies and soc...
Levi Strauss & Co, United States
On the face of it a solar powered dome, a windmill and a dryer hidden behind a work of art have very little in common. What links them is that they were all creative submissions to a crowdsourcing a...
Walkers, United Kingdom
Walkers is a British snack food manufacturer, most famous in the UK for its flavored crisps (potato chips). Despite a strong market presence, extensive advertising campaigns and years of bumper sales...
The Government of British Columbia, Canada
The Government of British Columbia is a recognized leader in taking action to promote environmental sustainability and forward thinking green practices. As with other public bodies and organizations...
Music Hackday, United Kingdom
Take a few hundred artists, musicians and hackers and squirrel them away for a weekend and the end result is a neat demonstration of the power of the crowd. The Music Hack Day Series is a turbo-charg...
Work Play Experience, Germany
On Friday 11th March 2011 at more than fifty locations around the world, hundreds of participants interested in services and customer experience took part in 48 hours of ‘innovation jamming’. T...
United States Department of Agriculture, United States
Crowdsourcing has been deployed in the nationwide US fight against obesity. To get children off their sofas and to exercise more the First Lady Michelle Obama launched an open innovation competition...
FINISH Society, India
Open innovation enjoys an impressive track record in helping to tackle numerous problems and issues in the developing world, such as lack of access to clean water, the threat of mosquitoes and malaria...
mWomen Connect, United States
The Spring 2011 Mobile App Challenge organised by the GSMA (Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association) was a series of open innovation contests aimed at the app developer community and anybody else with ide...
The City of Portland, United States
These days the most forward thinking CEOs see how collaboration can play a big part in their success and are being seduced by the benefits of open innovation. What’s good for private industry is al...
Ashoka Changemakers, United States
Open innovation has already created an explosive growth in innovative solutions and product ideas in a range of disciplines, encompassing such disparate fields as t-shirt designs and aeronautical engi...
Volkswagen , Germany
Open innovation and in particular open innovation contests are becoming more mainstream as companies large and small look for new ways to innovate, solve problems and steal a march on their competitor...
ARCHIVE (Architecture for Health In Vulnerable Environments), United States
After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010 thousands of volunteers and aid groups flocked into the impoverished country to administer food, water, first aid and to start the rebuilding efforts....
Local Motors, United States
Local Motors creates car designs through a series of open innovation and crowdsourcing initiatives. The Arizona-based company was co-founded in 2007 based on its belief that the car industry was not m...
BMW, Germany
Car giant BMW has for a number of years now been reaching out to engineers and innovators with open innovation and crowd sourcing initiatives. The most recent incarnation of which has been its Co-C...
Treehugger.com "LifeEdited", United States
Breakthrough ideas can and often do emerge by having a fresh set of eyes look at a problem. Open innovation can bring new and diverse perspectives to bear on old and familiar dilemmas which is what a...
Fiat, Italy
In Sao Paulo Auto Show that happened in October 2010, Fiat launched the Fiat Mio, the world's first crowd sourced car, a futuristic concept car based on the ideas of thousands of people around the wor...
The Government of Ireland, Ireland
For a number of years now governments at all levels in numerous countries have been experimenting with open innovation. The principle aims are to provide better services for constituents and to open ...
Swarovski, Australia
These days companies are tapping into an almost bottomless well of ideas; consumer creativity. Traditional business models are being tweaked and amended to favor user-generated content and open inno...
MUJI, Japan
Customer-led innovation is one of the most exciting developments in open innovation and it builds on the passion, ingenuity and creativity of a brand’s loyal consumers.
We are no longer passive ...
Bombardier Transportation, Germany
Global transportation company Bombardier was looking for ways to whisk itself into the future by imagining what the interiors of trains would look like further along the track. So it organized an ope...
Lego Group, Denmark
The ‘open’ in open innovation can reveal itself in a number of ways. For example, it can refer to overcoming the “not invented here” syndrome by welcoming external input.
Openness is ...
NASA, United States
NASA has no shortage of tough technical problems to crack, and though the space agency may be packed to the rafters with top intellects it realizes that it sometimes needs external help to create solu...
Government of Finland, Finland
Streams of raw data of themselves are not interesting, but they can be turned into useful applications that are of great benefit to citizens. For a number of years open innovation has been transform...
Mark R. Hartman (Cornell University), United States
Typically, an open innovation contest awards a fixed amount of money to the best solution or solutions. The seeker has its problem solved in good time and the provider not only receives financial rew...
Gabriel Ltd, Denmark
Open innovation is one of the most cost effective ways for companies to solve their R&D challenges. Many organizations don’t know what they don’t know and they therefore spend (some would say was...
Tesco, United Kingdom
Tesco is an international grocery retailer, headquartered in the UK and like many of its competitors it has expanded into the online grocery sector. For a couple of years it has been looking at ways ...
GE, United States
Ranked the world’s second largest business by Forbes and with revenues of $157 billion, GE is a giant global conglomerate with immense resources that is constantly searching for new areas of opportu...
Orange UK, United Kingdom
When companies want to boost their innovation and make best use of the wisdom of the crowd the role of open innovation brokers or intermediaries is vital to ensuring a successful outcome
Most comp...
United States Army, United States
The concept of open innovation is as beautiful as it is elegant; present a problem that needs to be solved, and someone somewhere in the world will be able to come up with the solution. Of increasi...
The State of California, United States
The ballot box is not the only means by which the general public can influence the way their neighborhoods, towns and regions are run as open innovation and crowdsourcing are giving people plenty of o...
Management Innovation Exchange (MIX), United States
The fruits of open innovation are not only product-based as an OI strategy can be applied to reinventing how companies are organized to make them more streamline and effective.
Launched in 2010 the...
Dr. Andrew Deonarine, Canada
If your organisation has already embraced open innovation then it has joined the ranks of some of the world’s most innovative companies who have come to realise that great ideas can come from the ou...
Quilts of Denmark, Denmark
Quilts of Denmark is a small international company, founded in 2000 that operates in more than 30 countries and produces high-quality, functional bedding.
The company has engaged in open innovat...
Designboom and The Seoul Design Foundation, South Korea
In an effort to improve its urban environment with an emphasis on eco-friendly themes, South Korea’s capital city of Seoul has launched a number of initiatives and programs. The Seoul Cycle Design ...
Made.com, United Kingdom
Open innovation and crowdsourcing are rapidly redefining business models. One such company to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd is a UK-based furniture retailer.
Made.com is an online ...
Greener Gadgets Design Cometition, United States
Innovators and entrepreneurial minds are turning their intellectual firepower on how open innovation can benefit the common good. One of the most pressing issues of our time is the damage being done ...
Cure Together, United States
Most good doctors will freely admit that they don’t everything about a patient's condition which is why patients are advised to make accurate notes about their symptoms to help the medical professio...
City of San Francisco, United States
Many people complain about the policies their governments pursue, and declare that they could do a better job if given half the chance. Well, open innovation is giving them that chance as it offers t...
Fiat, Italy
Italian car making giant Fiat has turned up the throttle on open innovation to solicit public involvement in creating the car of the future. The Fiat Mio (which translates as “my Fiat”) is a conc...
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, United States
In early 2010 a new US nationwide open innovation competition was launched.
The goals of the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning were to discover and nurture br...
U.S. Economic Development Administration, United States
Entrepreneurs, investors, non-profits, foundations and universities were all invited to take part in a US-nationwide open innovation competition designed to support the most creative ideas to drive te...
Hallmark Cards, Inc., United States
Greetings card manufacturer Hallmark has catapulted its products into the digital era after searching for new technologies via an open innovation broker.
Greeting Card Innovation
The days when...
Electrolux, Sweden
Electrolux opened its Design lab as an annual, global open innovation design competition in 2003, inviting undergraduate and graduate industrial design students to submit designs for futuristic househ...
GlaxoSmithKline, United Kingdom
GlaxoSmithKline has delved into the "open innovation" sphere in a multitude of ways.
One aspect involves developing a "patent pool" which would give access to IP, such as the assay data involved i...
General Electric, United States
GE has delved into the open innovation arena, recently launching its Ecomagination Challenge that solicits ideas for new business ventures relating to how to build the next-generation power grid. Any...
Cadbury, United Kingdom
In 2006 Cadbury embraced open innovation, turning to collaboration with external partners to find solutions and innovations they could bring to market.
Even though they have global sales topping $7...
Quirky.com, United States
Quirky.com takes the idea of open innovation and crowdsourcing to a whole new level.
You submit your ideas for a new product, and have a community of designers, inventors, engineers and marketers, ...
James Dyson Award, United States
This year's winner of the James Dyson Award for innovation in the UK, goes to Timothy Whitehead, who developed a water purifying bottle that uses ultraviolet light to sterilize drinking water.
The...
Kruger Products, United States
Taking a cue from other Fortune 500 companies, Kruger Products ran a design contest, the "Scotties Design Challenge", that asked consumers to create a new look for their popular tissue box.
The id...
Natan Linder, United States
The Tony Stark Innovation Challenge chose MIT graduate student Natan Linder as the winner of its open innovation challenge.
Linder's invention, the LuminAR is a digital bulb with built-in internet...
LG, United States
LG Electronics third open innovation contest asked contestants to submit ideas for the next generation cell phone. More than 400 submissions were presented to LG. Of all the ideas submitted, LG deemed...
Cisco, United States
Awarding it's second I-Prize of $250,000 to a team of five university students from Mexico, has gained Cisco a potential billion-dollar business idea titled: "Life Account." The idea is to gather inf...
In a recent open innovation contest to reduce paper cup consumption, Starbucks has awarded the winning $10,000 idea to "<a href=http://www.jovoto.com/contests/drink-sustainably/ideas/4751 target=_blan...
Paper-Feet, United Kingdom
Open innovation offers social entrepreneurs plenty of opportunities to create new ways of addressing social needs or promote better business.
Recognising both this and the power of student creati...
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Canada
“Thanks to the Web companies that move now can leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.” That was USA Today...
Massachusetts Institute of Technology , United States
The <a href="http://challenge.bfi.org/" target=_blank>Buckminster Fuller Challenge</a> is an annual open innovation competition hosted by the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI). It encourages the cre...
Ecovative Design, United States
Open innovation contests have long been used by governments and organizations to accelerate the speed with which ideas are generated. They are powerful instruments that can be used by any company or ...
New York City's Economic Development Corporation , United States
The Big Apple wanted some big ideas to improve government transparency and accountability and promote development of the digital media industry. So it came up with an open innovation competition to d...
Cancer Research UK, United Kingdom
Cancer Research UK, one of the UK’s leading cancer charities decided to turn to open innovation to help it raise more money to beat cancer. It was looking for fresh and new ideas to secure more fu...
Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation , United States
“Rise to the Challenge: Healthcare Innovation 2010” is the first open innovation healthcare related competition of its kind in the United States and was created to encourage participants to create...
AMAS
With the world staring down the barrel of financial ruin as the financial crisis lays waste to economies, one enterprising country had a bright idea to help get it out of a fix – ask the public for ...
Unilever
Purell is the breakthrough technology that was developed out of this collaborative effort. Launched in 2005, Purell is now bringing safe drinking water to millions of people, bringing relief from jaun...
Philips Eletronics India Ltd, Manipal University, India
Manipal University is a name to remember, not just across the length and breadth of India, but worldwide. The fact that students from 52 countries are studying here is a testimony to this fame. Fired ...
Security and Defence Agenda, Belgium
Open innovation brokers accelerate the innovation process by linking solution seekers with providers, offering technical know-how, and organising open innovation contests and online jams that bring di...
Imagine H2O, United States
Water scarcity is one of the world’s biggest woes, and as the climate continues to heat up the planet's governments are latching on to anything that will improve efficiencies.
Many ideas have b...
A Commercial Bank in the United Kingdom, United Kingdom
With an ever changing marketplace demanding better services and products innovation is key. The walls between companies and consumers are disappearing as boardrooms across the world recognize the imp...
Royal Bank of Canada, Canada
Many companies realized long ago that internal R&D is only one part of their innovation portfolio, and it may not even be the driving force behind research efforts. The pace of change is so quick, a...
Daimler, Germany
Daimler’s “Style Your Smart” open innovation contest yielded 50,000 ideas in a six week period as 8,000 participants from more than 100 countries used their creativity to help the car manufactur...
Government of the District of Columbia, United States
Open innovation has been the driving force behind a number of inspiring initiatives to make governments more open and transparent. Not only do they foster better communications between citizens and ...
DiabetesMine, United States
The most innovative ideas do not always come from a discipline’s own experts, sometimes answers are provided by individuals or groups in unrelated industries. They are not constrained by a particul...
IBM
IBM has open innovation in its blood. Since 2001 the multinational has been holding innovation jams, where thousands of employees brainstorm ideas over a period of a few days. The first jam was an e...
Procter and Gamble
Procter and Gamble’s decision to give its innovation model a face-lift and adopt open innovation strategies in the early part of the last decade was a daring move by the consumer products giant. I...
The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) , United States
The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) launched the CIMIT Prize, a US nationwide open innovation competition in 2009. The contest will be an annual feature for the ne...
A Consumer Products Company
Open innovation has gained importance in recent years as companies from multiple industries realize they could end up as dead as a dodo if they ignore leveraging the expertise of external sources to a...
Vodafone
One of the world’s leading telecommunications companies, Vodafone, now hosts an an open innovation competition designed to “promote innovation and increase implementation of wireless related techn...
Hilton Hotels
There is a popular and ever increasing trend amongst businesses to turn away from high-priced consultants, and their own in house teams and instead embrace open innovation contests.
Hilton Hotels i...
A Global 500 Company
A Global 500 company needed help with a widely known and long-standing industry problem, so it followed a course that an increasing number of companies are taking – it turned to an online open innov...
A Major Appliance Manufacturer
The traditional corporate model of only innovating from within is starting to look a bit dated. An ever increasing number of companies including major global players such as Kraft, Hewlett Packard an...
Intel Corporation
Businesses are not the only beneficiaries of an open innovation approach to discovering new technologies; communities in the developing world are also benefiting from solutions to some of the most cha...
Fasson Roll North America, a division of Avery Dennison, United States
Open innovation has become the hot topic in business since the publication in 2003 of Henry Chesborough’s book ‘Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology’. ...
The Sunlight Foundation, United States
Since the concept of open innovation first swept through the corridors of corporations in 2003 it has continually proved its mettle by helping companies find new ways of solving their most urgent prob...
A Fortune 500 Consumer Products Company
One of the many advantages to companies that decide to utilize open innovation is the cross boundary approach to solving technical challenges. A number of organizations have found the answers they nee...
General Mills, United States
General Mills is a Fortune 500 corporation headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota that markets some of the world’s most popular brands including Yoplait, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Häagen-Dazs, and...
The Australian Government, Australia
One of the most successful and powerful trends in open innovation is the concept of mashups – where a new innovative web-based service or application is created from the combination of the data or f...
A Global Dairy Manufacturer
An ever increasing number of companies – both large and small – have been reaching beyond their core competencies and adopting open innovation strategies to remain competitive in an increasingly d...
Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen and SYSTEMS , Germany
To access the best brains around the world and to come up with innovative and practical applications in satellite navigation Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen (an aerospace and satellite company...
Inter-American Development Bank, Panama
In the ceaseless search for new ideas, the open innovation landscape offers a planet full of brilliant brains with the skills to generate solutions and novel ways of thinking. Cash-based contests are...
Virgin Atlantic, United Kingdom
Virgin Atlantic has been flirting with open innovation to help it come up with new web-based ideas to improve its services and boost its bank balance.
Together with NESTA, the UK’s National End...
Sealed Air Corporation, United States
Sealed Air Corp is a global manufacturer of packaging materials and systems including Bubble Wrap, and it has fully embraced open innovation to boost the bottom line.
Although no strangers to wor...
Greif, Inc., United States
Greif is a global industrial packaging products and services company with a presence in more than 45 countries. Due to an intense phase of restructuring involving mergers and acquisitions, and hot on...
NESTA, United Kingdom
In 2007 an open innovation challenge was set for the entire UK – reduce carbon emissions and make a big difference to the world. A £1 million ($1.6 million USD) prize fund was set up which spurred...
A small UK-based company, United Kingdom
Faulty packaging, falling sales, and a problem they couldn’t solve led Procter and Gamble to an open innovation broker to help them find a fix and reverse the decline.
Packaging Problem
The gl...
iCarpool.com, United States
In a gigantic effort to cut down on traffic congestion and reduce pollution the Intelligent Transport Society of America (ITS) launched a global open innovation competition for commuters, citizens, en...
Masten Space Systems, United States
The space agency NASA continues to develop means of exploring the solar system with down-to- earth help via open innovation contests.
Lunar Lander Challenge
The Lunar Lander Challenge required ...
Tewson Seeoun, Choochart Haruechaiyasek, Toshiaki Kondo , Thailand
Hewlett Packard wants customers to enjoy a better and greener experience when they print web pages so they sought a solution through an open innovation challenge for multimedia researchers across the ...
knfb Reading Technology, Inc. , United States
Mobile phone supplier Nokia is actively engaged in open innovation through its research center and via open innovation contests.
Global Open Innovation Competition
“Calling All Innovators” i...
David A. Gonzales II , United States
How we fuel the future is one of today’s biggest challenges. Increasingly corporations and research organizations are exploring open innovation avenues for new ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions....
Stacy Cho, United States
HopeLab is a nonprofit research organization that looks to improve the quality of life of young people with chronic illnesses, and it ventured down the open innovation route when it was looking for ne...
Michigan Molecular Institute, United States
Xerox is a corporation with impressive R&D capabilities, yet it has embraced open innovation to strengthen the potential of its own world class researchers.
Stuck with a Printer Problem
The comp...
Prof Andrzej Bartke , United States
Inspired by the X Prize open innovation competition, the MPrize (formerly known as the “Methuselah Mouse Prize”) is a scientific research prize awarded to scientists who can successfully extend th...
Emily Albinski, United States
By engaging with open innovation LG Mobile Phones has accessed a vast talent pool that would be far beyond the means of most companies. Not only might this lead to a new product and new customers, bu...
Dean Gregory, United Kingdom
The annual Postcode Lottery Green Challenge is a major open innovation competition held in the Netherlands to encourage the creation of green products and services. It is open to individual inventor...
Wolfgang Schaerfl, Germany
Corona Ceramics, headquartered in Bogota in Columbia has been developing and manufacturing home improvement products for more than 125 years, and is now including open innovation as part of its resear...
LaserMotive, United States
NASA continues its bold exploration of space, but it’s not doing it alone. Increasingly the space agency is turning to open innovation competitions to help it develop the technologies it will need ...
Bart Swennen, Gert Vos, and Johannes Taelman, Belgium
Governments in Europe are now actively looking to web 2.0 tools and open innovation to improve public services. There is a growing body of opinion in Europe that says that the development of IT appl...
Prof Graham Hutchings, Wales, and Prof Tobin Marks, United States
The Dow Chemical Company is one of the largest chemical manufacturing companies in the world and though it boasts an extensive and well-funded R&D organization it is turning to open innovation to give...
Giorgia Sgargetta, Italy
Procter and Gamble needed help with a pressing problem. Some of their best in-house brains were unable to crack a challenge that the company had set for the creation of a new dishwashing detergent. ...
John Barrie and Dr Norbert Muller, United States
It gets hot in the city, and though air conditioning will cool you down and chill you out, the technology uses a lot of energy. An open innovation competition was created by two organizations in Bost...
David Bradin, United States
One of the benefits of open innovation is that someone somewhere may already have the answer to a problem that’s been vexing you for ages. That’s certainly what Procter and Gamble found when they...
Aaron M. Renn, United States
Chicago is notorious for its traffic problems with bottlenecks and gridlock daily occurrences experienced by many drivers. To get the city moving the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce posted an open in...
Edward Melcarek, Canada
Colgate-Palmolive turned to open innovation to help it solve a challenge that had bewildered and bemused its R&D department.
After many failed attempts the R&D types at Colgate-Palmolive could only...
Russell McMahon, New Zealand
Mark Bent, CEO of SunNight Solar turned to open innovation to help create a better design for the solar-powered flashlight that he had created for the developing world.
Solar Solution
A former m...
Seward Rutkove and Dr. Harvey Arbesman, United States
Prize4Life, a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding new cures and treatments for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) has turned to open innovation to speed u...
Tom Kruer, United States
It is thanks to open innovation that millions of malaria carrying mosquitoes will be breathing their last. Human sweat, sunlight and paraffin wax are the main ingredients of a groundbreaking trap that...
Zacary Brown, United States
ASSET India is dedicated to alleviating poverty in the subcontinent by providing IT skills and opportunities to victims of trafficking and children of sex workers. The foundation adopted an open innov...
Professor Jean-Claude Bradley, United States
Jean-Claude Bradley is Associate Professor of Chemistry at Drexel University and has worked in many laboratories throughout his scientific career. One aspect of lab life has always irritated him and ...
Ory Okolloh, Kenya
Even though we live in a 24 hour news society the mainstream media is not large enough to cover every story when it breaks. During crisis situations there is hardly ever a centralized place for repor...
Dr. Kana M Sureshan, India
When the non-profit Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance) needed to solve some drug manufacturing problems it turned to open innovation for the answers.
Tuberculosis is an infectiou...
Paul's Robotics, United States
If humans are ever going to live on the moon or indeed if we are to harness some of its natural resources we’re going to need the tools to be able to dig up and dump thousands of tones of lunar soil...
G24 Innovations, United Kingdom
It is a sobering thought; there are currently 1.7 billion people around the world without electricity. The problem is at its most acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where more than five hundred million peop...
Peter Homer, United States
Out in the cold depths of space an astronaut’s glove can swell up like a balloon. It becomes stiff, stubborn and rigid, making the handling and manipulation of objects extremely onerous. It is a pr...
Drew Buschhorn, United States
Cyclododecane is a wax-like organic compound that was used by art conservationists as a temporary sealant for weak and fragile objects. It worked well, but it was very expensive and not particularly...
Gary Schwartzberg, United States
When Irene Rosenfeld flew into the top job at Kraft in 2006 she inherited a company that was losing market share, in part due to its lackluster production pipeline. The pressure was on for the big ch...
Bakery in Bologna, Italy
Procter and Gamble are open innovation giants, with more than 35% of their new ideas coming from outside sources. However, it hasn’t always been this way.
Historically P&G relied on internal r...
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University - USA, Lund University from Sweden, and Novartis from Switzerland, United States
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, where the body does not produce enough insulin, or the insulin that is produced is abnormal. The condition affects more than 170 million people a...
Anna Gossen and Niels Gossen from Germany, Sergey Bessonnitsyn from Russia, Germany
Cisco, the computer networking giant created a global contest to come up with new ideas and markets that would fuel its future.
Business Opportunities
Cisco’s I-Prize developed out of the comp...
Eric Umansky, Scott Klein, Aron Pilhofer, Ben Koski, United States
First there were newspapers, then television, and now it’s the Internet. The media landscape is moving fast with new technologies forever changing the way that news is delivered and received. News...
BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos
It was the three-year computer competition that had mathematicians, statisticians, software engineers and cyber geeks from all over the world working feverishly toward a $1 million prize.
The chall...
Fractal Graphics, and Taylor Wall & Associates, Australia
Rob McEwen was sitting on a fortune; the trouble was he didn’t know exactly where it was located.
It’s the year 2000 and the CEO of Goldcorp Inc., a gold producer headquartered in Vancouver, Ca...
John Davis, United States
Despite extensive cleanup efforts more than 26 thousand US gallons of oil remained at the bottom of Prince William Sound, nearly twenty years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground.
The oil tanker had ...
Burt Rutan, United States
Ever since Yuri Gagarin whistled round the Earth aboard Vostok 1 and Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind millions of ordinary mortals have entertained the thought, “Gee I wouldn’t mind ...
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