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Five Burning Questions about Implementing Open Innovation

Dec-30-11 By IdeaConnection
The research and advisory company Nerac has been holding a number of executive roundtable discussions on open innovation throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. Participants were all Nerac clients who are engaged with OI at some level.

From all the debates and discussions several common themes emerged and now Nerac analyst David Fazzina has produced a short but welcome document that answers the top five questions that emerged from the executive talkfest.

New Year Resolution–Read More about Business and Innovation

Dec-29-11 By Jane Mundy
One of my New Year resolutions is to read more about business.  But countless business books are published each year,  so how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, without spending hours on end reading book reviews? Or reviewing the reviewer—argh!

2012 Marketing Forecast: More Crowdsourcing

Dec-29-11 By IdeaConnection
Have traditional television adverts had their day? Seethu Seetharaman, professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis predicts that 30 second television commercials and full page magazine ads will wane as more use is made of crowdsourcing, Internet viral campaigns and product placement.

In a story by his university’s newsroom he says, “Traditional expensive advertising is no longer effective given all the clutter, as well as the emergence of technologies, like digital video recorders, that block the ads from even being viewed, much less absorbed, by consumers.”

Crowdsourcing Lunar Search for Signs of Alien Life

Dec-28-11 By IdeaConnection
If intelligent alien lifeforms exist our chances of detecting them may be improved if they are untidy.

Two prominent physicists, Prof Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University are proposing a new crowdsourcing initiative that would have volunteers all over the world scouring hundreds of thousands of photos of the moon  for tell-tale signs that ET may have once passed through our cosmic neighbourhood.

Top Innovation Predictions for 2012

Dec-27-11 By IdeaConnection
Do you face 2012 with fear and trepidation or are you excited about what could be just round the corner? Could it be your best year yet?

Even with the most highly polished crystal ball nobody knows what the next 12 months has in store. American baseball legend Casey Stengel once said, "Never make predictions, especially about the future". Nevertheless those wise sages at Innovation Excellence have pulled together a top ten list of predictions for innovators in 2012.  And paying attention to them may just improve your chances of keeping and staying ahead of the pack.

Survey Reveals How it Can Pay to be a Member of the Crowd

Dec-23-11 By IdeaConnection
Interesting results from a new survey of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers offers some revealing insights into who makes up this virtual crowd and how much they rely on crowdsourcing for their income.

For starters, nearly twenty five percent of those who responded to the survey said that crowdsourcing is responsible for more than ten percent of their annual income.

 

Crowdfunding with New Facebook Game

Dec-22-11 By IdeaConnection
Online social games do more than exercise your fingers; they can elevate your thinking, improve your decision making, enhance your social interactions, boost your creativity and nurture your problem solving skills. And they can be used to benefit less fortunate people in the world.

WeTopia by Sojo Studios is a recently launched social game that allows players to fund programs that improve the lives of communities. It is the latest in a burgeoning craze of games for social good that engage the crowd on humanitarian issues and motivates them to help.

Open Innovation to Help Predict Natural Disasters

Dec-20-11 By IdeaConnection
Meteorologists and weather forecasters all make valiant efforts to forecast the weather. Sometimes they are spot on and other times you might as well look at a piece of seaweed to find out what’s going on in the atmosphere. But perhaps the days of hit and miss weather forecasts will soon be a thing of the past, because the Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), a non-profit research and development organisation and Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation (MCTI) are using open innovation to predict climatic patterns. The aim is not so you and I can know whether to pack a brolly when we head out, but the far more serious and valuable objective of developing natural disaster early warning system capabilities for Brazil.

Building Your Creative Endurance

Dec-19-11 By IdeaConnection
Originality and inspiration may drip from your every pore, but every now and again the creative muscles won’t budge for love nor money. As an innovator, creativity is at heart of everything you do, so how can you rejuvenate your creative powers and keep them in tip top shape?

‘Lateral Action’ has a stimulating article that provides six top tips to restore creative fitness and once that’s done, to build up creative endurance.

The Future of Business is Crowdsourcing

Dec-17-11 By IdeaConnection
US companies will soon be hiring millions of people from all over the world such as designers, coders, marketers and writers, says futurist, author and entrepreneur Ross Dawson, co-author of newly released book Getting Results From Crowds: The definitive guide to using crowd-sourcing to grow your business.

He believes that the crowd is going to fundamentally change the way business operates, not just a few companies here and there.  In addition, this radical shift will expose nearly all US workers to increased competition and opportunities.