Open Innovation
SUCCESS STORIES

Open innovation success stories from a broad range of companies, and a diverse range of open innovation intermediaries.

	Crowdsourcing a New Beer Beverage with Budweiser Anheuser-Busch InBev, United States Using crowdsourcing to find new flavors is a popular approach among food and beverage companies. In recent years, we've seen new potato chip, ice cream and pizza flavors and that's just for starters....
	Crowdsourced Solutions to Protect the Planet Climate CoLab, United States The Climate CoLab, a project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) runs a series of open innovation contests to find solutions for numerous challenges presented by our planet's changing c...
	Music Star Crowdsources Song Inspiration ReThink Housing, United States Crowdsourcing pop songs has been a mini trend running through the music industry. In recent years, we've seen Coca-Cola and American Idol crowdsourcing a song for Carly Rae Jepsen and the Swedish DJ
	Solving Crop Problems by Leveraging the Crowd PlantVillage, United States Crowdsourced science projects that involve citizen scientists, academics and other knowledgeable experts have made significant contributions to numerous fields. They include astronomy, ecology and AI...
	The Crowd Strikes Back with another Movie Classic Star Wars Uncut, United States The crowd has once again revealed its ultra-creative side by remaking a shot-for-shot version of "The Empire Strikes Back", the second movie in the original Star Wars trilogy. The crowdsourced cut wa...
	Open Innovation Defies Physics to Give Aerodynamics a Lift BAE Systems, United Kingdom According to news reports, an open innovation collaboration between scientists has resulted in an innovation that has ‘defied the laws of physics’. Researchers from BAE Systems and Queen Mary’s...
	Crowdsourcing Apps to Improve City Life BigApps NYC, United States Data sharing and collaboration enables and accelerates knowledge creation. There is innovation gold hidden away in data that can be rooted out if brilliant minds are allowed to get to work. BigAp...
	Open Innovation and a Tough Political Decision Institute of Economic Affairs, United Kingdom One of the most fascinating innovations in open innovation is how the paradigm is being used to engage citizens in political processes, giving them more of a say in how their neighborhoods, cities and...
	Crowdsourcing Breakthrough Cognitive Technology Solutions IBM, United States So, let’s say you are a successful multinational technology and consulting corporation that has developed a new technology that you believe can radically transform how consumers and businesses inter...
	Open Innovation and the World’s First Ever 3D Printed Car Design Local Motors, United States Local Motors is successfully driving forward a change in how cars are designed by running competitions to find innovations. It is a process that appears to be working with novel designs coming off th...
	Improving City Life with Crowdsourcing Apps Contest New Cities Foundation, France Tightly focused contests with a narrow scope and a clear set of guidelines can be a boon to organizations and companies that operate them. With clear objectives in mind, innovators can concentrate t...
	Crowdsourcing Solutions to Global Problems with NASA NASA, United States The space agency NASA has long been a fan of open collaboration and of working with the crowd to solve some of the many technical hurdles it faces in pioneering the frontiers of space. By bringing a
	Turning to the Crowd for the Next Big Jewish Idea The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, United States In 2011 the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles embarked on an open innovation search for a big idea that could help mobilize the Jewish community. So, the <a href="http://www.thenextbigjewishidea.com/"
	Air France’s Open Innovation Approach Takes Off Air France, France Despite the many advantages of tapping into the brain power of the crowd, some enterprises experience nothing but frustration. They throw out a challenge and receive a tidal wave of solutions from eve...
	Fresh Banking Ideas Sought from the Crowd Westpac, New Zealand Crowdsourcing with consumers comes with numerous benefits: increased innovation capacity, a flow of new ideas, reduced innovation risk and accelerated time to market with new products and services to
	Crowdsourcing Competitions to Find Solutions to Robocalls Misery Federal Trade Commission, United States Technology marches on at breakneck speeds with the promise of making our lives easier and better. However, technology can also be a pain in the neck. It is technology that we have to blame for roboc...
	New York Hotel Designed by the Crowd Prodigy Network, United States One of the boons of open innovation contests is that by setting ambitious goals, participants raise their game to find solutions. We have seen it time and again in historic competitions such as the L...
	How Open Innovation Helped to Create a Billion Dollar Brand Procter and Gamble, United States Febreze is a brand of odor eliminator that started out as a fabric refresher and has since become a multi-product success story, branching out into such categories as plug-in oils, odor eliminating ca...
	How the Crowd is Exploring the Moon Zooniverse, United Kingdom The last time humans set foot on the moon was in 1972 with Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo lunar landing program. Since astronaut Eugene Cernan climbed back into the lunar module Challenge...
	Open Innovation Boost for the Future of Education Microsoft, United States The power of the crowd can achieve great things when smart brains come together to work on ways to bring about meaningful changes in society. Their ideas, once put into action can make a terrific imp...
	Wine Region Elicits Crowd Help for Architectural Project Mendoza Art District, Argentina The Province of Mendoza, Argentina, in South America is the center of the world-renowned Argentinian wine industry, a desert region with an artificial irrigation system that supports mile after mile o...
	Next Generation Medical Innovation Via Open Innovation United States Army, United States No one organisation, company or outfit has the monopoly on great ideas, a fact recognized by an ever increasing number of public and private sector outfits that are turning to the crowd for inspiratio...
	Crowdsourcing Historic Ships to Improve Climate Modelling Zooniverse, United Kingdom “Many hands make light work”, the old saying goes. Today’s open innovation and crowdsourcing initiatives demonstrate how this is so. They utilize the smarts of the crowd to solve problems and br...
	Harnessing the Crowd to End Climate Change The MIT Climate CoLab, United States When smart people from diverse backgrounds get together and pool their intellectual resources, the results can be truly phenomenal. Free from corporate or university constraints they can work indepen...
	Open Innovation Solutions for Mental Health Problems in the Developing World Scientists Without Borders, United States The power of the crowd and open innovation may well be helping businesses solve their problems, innovate and develop new products, but the benefits don’t end there. Soliciting the contribution of d...
	Open Innovation to Future-Proof a Business Model Valora, Switzerland In looking ahead to the future, Swiss-based company Valora realized that one of its business wings could soon run into trouble. The company operates the majority of kiosks (called “k kiosks” in S...
	New Product Lines with Open Innovation AkzoNobel, Netherlands AkzoNobel, is a Dutch multinational that creates decorative paints, performance coatings and specialty chemicals. For a number of years it has been very active in the open innovation space looking fo...
	Working with the Crowd to Solve Civic Issues The City of San Francisco, United States Open innovation is providing communities in numerous countries with the means to start to affect change in their localities. Not only as a way to report civic problems but also to ideate, design, dev...
	Open Innovation Achieves when Traditional Procurement Fails to Deliver United States Department of Veterans Affairs, United Kingdom In January 2014, the U.S. General Services Administration’s Chellenge.gov open innovation portal was recognized for the leading part it is playing in innovation. The website beat 600 applicants to
	Reducing Flight Fuel Costs with Open Innovation General Electric (GE), United States Idea contests are a popular form of open innovation that capture the imagination of brilliant minds and focus the attention on speeding up innovation outcomes. General Electric (GE) is a prominent
	General Mills Develops Two New Food Products with Open Innovation Partners General Mills, United States General Mills, one of the world’s largest food companies is no stranger to letting the outside in. Since 2007 when the global company launched the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-Win)...
	Crowdsourcing Competition for Breakthrough Clean Energy Solutions The MIT Clean Energy Prize, United States Enticed by the lure of valuable funding, exposure and the chance to network with key industry players, dozens of student groups submitted their clean energy solutions to a prestigious annual competiti...
	Crowdsourcing projects Transforms Old Library into an Arts Center Volunteers, United Kingdom Crowdsourcing has been embraced by a number of cities and communities around the world as a way of funding or developing local projects, to solve issues and incorporate citizens more in the decisions
	Financial Institution Banks on Crowdsourcing Success Sberbank, Russia Sberbank is the largest bank in Russia and one of the biggest in Europe. Since 2009 this huge financial institution has been using crowdsourcing methodologies to innovate products and services and ga...
	Global Open Innovation Contest for City Landmark City Planning Department, Helsinki, Finland Helsinki’s South Harbor area is an important gateway to the city and country. It’s the largest passenger harbor in Finland and an area that’s very close to the center of Helsinki, “an essenti...
	X PRIZE Contest Finds Breakthrough Oil Cleanup Technology Elastec, United States An innovation competition is a tried and tested way of providing new concepts for a company’s product pipeline or to solve technical challenges, with contests ranging from the relatively easy to see...
	The Force is Strong with this Crowdsourcing Contest Pringles/Star Wars, United States When you have access to a source of creative external brainpower what do you do with it? Many companies have embraced open innovation and crowdsourcing to create new products, refine existing ones or...
	Open Innovation Partnership Leads to Breakthrough Laundry Product Procter and Gamble/MonoSol, United States Procter and Gamble is one of the world’s biggest and most successful consumer products companies. In recent years it has been widely lauded for its Connect and Develop program. This is an open inn...
	Crowdsourcing Quests for Better Hospitals and More Efficient Flying General Electric (GE), United States Instead of hiring a crack team of researchers to improve upon or develop new algorithms, some companies are turning to the crowd and setting up prize-based competitions instead. One of the most famou...
	Innovative Saline Bag Wins Open Innovation Contest for its Life-Saving Potential Fosmo Med Inc., United States Nobody knows when and where the next brilliant idea is going to come from - the product that will make our lives easier and disrupt a market, or the solution to a technical challenge that's holding a
	Open Innovation and the Future of Rocket Design DIYRockets, United States Venturing out into space whether through unmanned probes or aboard rockets and shuttles is no longer the preserve of large government institutions. The final frontier is the new frontier as numerous
	Heineken’s Global Search for Beer Concepts for Senior Citizens Heineken, Netherlands To gather fresh product ideas and widen the pool of creative inputs to its innovation efforts, Dutch brewing group Heineken created Ideas Brewery an open innovation portal. The company realises that
	Colourful Crowdsourcing Solution to Breast Cancer Challenges The DREAM Project, United States From studying the fundamental causes of diseases to tracking the spread of epidemics and searching for planets outside our solar system, open innovation is help to provide key scientific insights.
	Open Innovation Call for Healthy Ageing Concepts Mayo Clinic, United States Sadly for us mere mortals there’s no such thing as an elixir of immortality, but that doesn't stop people from looking for solutions to keep us healthy and active for as long as possible. In 2013...
	Open Innovation Energy Contest Yields Breakthrough Ideas U.S. Energy Department, United States With the energy and utility bills changing wildly over the years - usually going in the upwards direction rather than downwards - and concerns about the health of the planet, there has never been a gr...
	New York’s Open Innovation Search for Big Ideas New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), United States “Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the visionaries, the game changers that drive innovation and create new and exciting businesses that sustain the vibrancy of any city,” said Seth. W. Pinsky, Presi...
	Student Crowdsourcing Project Delivers World-Changing Ideas Dell/University of Texas at Austin, United States Using the principles of crowdsourcing, numerous organizations are encouraging social innovators to work together on their big ideas to change the world. Ever since 2007, the Dell Social Innovation
	Open Innovation Challenge Yields Novel E-Waste Management Solutions OpenIDEO People love gadgets. When new smartphones, iPad and laptop incarnations hit the shops, shelves are emptied within hours. But happy and content consumers leads to problems as old electronics are disca...
	Creative Children and their Dream Machines MyMachine, Belgium Children are often creating, dreaming and imagining. Theirs is a world of endless possibilities, but rarely do they get an opportunity to turn their wildest dreams into reality. Until now that is, a...
	The Power and Potential of People-Centered Innovation European Commission, Belgium When problems beset society, the clamour for solutions is loud and prolonged. Explanations and resolutions are demanded from politicians and public institutions, yet there is often dissatisfaction wit...
	Breakthrough Open Innovation with Internal Teams Bupa, United Kingdom Open innovation is not only about bringing the outside in. The paradigm is also a means of engaging those on the inside. Leveraging the creativity and smarts of employees is an effective way for fir...
	Crowdsourcing Global Development Goals The United Nations The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that were established following the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit. They have galvanized global attention and
	Open Innovation Gives Lifetime Brands a $50 Million Boost Lifetime Brands, United States Lifetime Brands, a North American company that designs, develops and markets a range of branded kitchenware, home and lifestyle products regularly seeks outside innovation. It recognizes there are lo...
	Open Innovation Collaboration Leads to an Eco-Friendly Paints Range AkzoNobel, Netherlands Open innovation comes in many forms from crowdsourcing design and product naming contests to tech scouting, partnerships, technical problem solving challenges and more. The use of diverse, external
	Facebook Games Fights Killer Fungus Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), United Kingdom When it comes to biological emergencies scientists need all the help they can get. Faced with a potential epidemic, the need for answers and strategies is crucial, yet sometimes the snail-like pace t...
	The Creativity of the Crowd Gives Canada a Boost Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), Canada One of the many things that crowdsourcing has going for it is the ability to fire up the passion of an interested group and galvanize people to get creative for a common goal. Marketers have cottoned...
	Open Innovation and Publishing's New Chapter Unbound Publishing, United Kingdom Open innovation is helping to change the landscape within numerous industries, from medicine to mechanical engineering, aviation to agriculture. It’s also causing some ripples in the publishing wor...
	Domino’s Pizza Cooks Up Delivery Vehicle Open Innovation Contest Domino's Pizza, United States Domino’s Pizza has a reputation for innovating pizza delivery services. It came up with the Heatwave Bag (heated bag to deliver oven-fresh pizzas) and the corrugated pizza box among other innovatio...
	Crowdsourcing and Colonoscopies: The Benefits of Distributed Knowledge for Cancer Diagnosis National Institutes of Health, United States In many industries computers and software programs do some of the heavy lifting and enhance the capabilities of workers. Medicine is just one of many areas to have benefited from smart technologies.
	Open Innovation and the Power of Health Data Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Engineering, United States The world is swimming with data - long reams of statistics, charts, graphs, and analyses. More of it is available to the general public than ever before as government institutions and organisations
	Crowdsourcing to Engage the Electorate Kevin Rudd/DesignCrowd, Australia To win elections politicians need recognition and votes. It’s a simple enough formula. But how do you engage and reach parts of the electorate that might otherwise not know you exist or care little...
	Crowdsourcing the Education Needs of the World Education for All, France In 2012 UNESCO teamed up with mobile phone company Nokia and nonprofit organization Pearson Foundation to launch the eight month long 'Education for All (EFA) Crowdsourcing Challenge'. The aim was
	Crowdsourcing to Save Lives Penn Medicine, United States Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are portable electronic devices that can save lives by jump starting a heart in cardiac arrest and returning it to its normal rhythm. In the United States, as...
	Open Innovation Accelerates Green Giant Product Innovation General Mills, United States The innovation landscape has changed. There are fewer companies today that think they can go it alone or that they have a monopoly on ideas and solutions. Open innovation is moving from the margin t...
	Crowdsourcing to Create a Disruptive Approach to Building Military Vehicles DARPA, United States In 2010 the US Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a major program to crowdsource the next generation of infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) through a
	Co-Creating with Consumers Puts a Sparkle in a Soft Drinks Brand PepsiCo, United States Product naming, labeling and package designing competitions are all the rage and a fun way for consumer-facing companies to engage their customers and attract some new ones. The rules are simple, par...
	Crowdsourcing the Recruitment Process Code Together, United States Crowdsourcing can be an effective recruitment tool that draws the brightest and most able people. By posting competitions to assorted groups companies can see who is coming up with the most intellige...
	Crowdsourcing at the Bottom of the Sea NEPTUNE Canada/University of Victoria, Canada Thanks to the power of the Internet hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens all over the world are helping scientists with their research endeavors. There are many citizen science initiatives cove...
	Open Innovation Cooks up New Frozen Vegetables Line General Mills and Burley Foods, United States General Mills is one of the leading practitioners of open innovation, a multinational corporation that has worked with innovators beyond its walls for a number of years. Its primary focus is on food
	Open Innovation to Unclog Cairo’s Roads The Cairo Transport App Challenge, Egypt The Cairo metropolitan area like those of so many other busy cities across the world experiences daily problems with congestion. It increases travel time, has adverse affects on air quality and publi...
	Crowdsourcing Discoveries in Deep Space Galaxy Zoo, United States From tracking comets and studying galaxies to designing drug molecules and searching for extraterrestrial life, members of the public are increasingly getting involved in scientific research. Cit...
	Crowdsourcing Potato Chip Flavors Boosts Sales Simba, South Africa Crowdsourcing contests are smart PR tools in addition to being valuable means of innovating. They have been enthusiastically embraced by some customer-facing companies as a way to market their brand...
	Novel Apps to Boost Fuel Economy US Government, United States In countries across the world, local, regional and national governments continue to release their data to empower citizens, improve public services, and spur innovation and economic growth. Data-sets
	Hackathon to Create Autism Apps AT&T/Autism Speaks, United States Hackathons are about getting things done. They are open innovation events where short bursts of intense activity by diverse groups of people tackle challenges and innovate. There are hackathons
	Global Community of Scientists Tackles Fungal Invasion John Innes Center/Sainsbury Laboratory, United Kingdom Ash dieback is a fungal disease that can wipe out whole woods of ash trees. It is caused by an aggressive pathogen known as Chalara fraxinea that first emerged in Poland in the 1990s and has swept ac...
	Schools Get Creative with Crowdsourced Sneaker Competition Vans, United States The Vans Custom Culture Contest is a crowdsourcing competition for high school students in the USA. It encourages them to give vent to their creative passions by coming up with original designs for s...
	International DJ Crowdsources a Pop Song Avicii, Sweden Lennon and McCartney, Goffin and King, Simon and Garfunkel, the pop landscape is littered with successful musical collaborations. So how about a new one - the world and DJ Avicii? The Swedish house...
	Novel Concepts at the Philips Innovation Open Contest Philips, Netherlands Consumer electronics behemoth Philips has long understood that great ideas can come from anywhere, not just company employees. It is the driving thought behind ‘Simply Innovate’ the open innovati...
	Flying High with Open Innovation and the Future of Hand Luggage Lufthansa, Germany German airline company Lufthansa frequently reaches out to the crowd for innovative ideas to enhance its passenger and freight services. It has long valued co-creation with consumers as a way to deve...
	Open Innovation to Help Prevent Mass Atrocities USAID and Humanity United, United States The Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention is a global open innovation initiative that is seeking novel technology-based solutions to deal with the worst kinds of human rights violations, such as rape...
	Open Innovation Contest Seeks Novel Bike Designs for Africa Cycling out of Poverty, Netherlands The Wiki-Bike African Design contest was an open innovation project to create sustainable bicycle designs made from environmentally friendly and locally sourced materials. The principle aim was to su...
	Philips Wins $10 Million Prize for Energy Efficient Light Bulb of the Future Philips, Netherlands Competitions spur innovation like nothing else, a fact not lost on the US government when it launched a multi-million dollar contest for environmentally friendly light bulbs. The L-Prize, also know...
	Crowdsourcing Helps Tackle a Killer E. coli Outbreak Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Councils (BBSRC), United Kingdom E. coli (Escherichia coli) is a common bacterium that lives in the human gut. Most strains are harmless and some are beneficial, for example, by helping us to digest our food. Occasionally though th...
	Open Innovation Help for Future Mars Missions NASA, United States With the American space agency NASA feeling the financial pinch it has had to reformulate some of its planned exploration of Mars. Budget cuts meant a partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA)...
	Open Innovation Speeds Up Development of a General Mills Snack Product General Mills, United States "I think the emphasis on open innovation has really broadened the minds of a lot of the people in our technical organization and across the company," said Jeff Resch, senior scientist, General Mills.
	Jewelry Brand’s Co-Creation Initiative to Reach New Markets Tanishq, India Tanishq is one of India’s largest jewelry brands, primarily selling pieces to affluent women in the 40-plus age bracket. To help it reach out to a new audience of young working women it held an ope...
	Iceland Crowdsources its Constitution Iceland's Constitutional Council, Iceland Open innovation is founded on two fundamental precepts – that a problem has already been solved somewhere else in the world and that organisations can access expertise beyond their borders (smarter
	Walmart Hosts Open Innovation ‘Talent’ Contest for New Products Walmart, United States Space on a Walmart shelf is a rare and much sought after thing. Every year thousands of would-be vendors make countless pitches to the American multinational retail chain hoping to convince sales team...
	Crowd Revved Up by BMW Open Innovation Contest BMW, Germany The way that cars are made hasn’t changed for generations. Companies employ designers who dream up a few models, then people higher up the corporate food chain give the green light to those they fe...
	Lockheed Martin’s Open Innovation Search for Cool Ideas Lockheed Martin, United States The American global aerospace, defense and security company Lockheed Martin has a long tradition of breakthrough innovations in numerous fields. To mark its 100th anniversary in 2012 the defense cont...
	Crowdsourcing to Spot Future Trends and Help Mobile Phone Giant to Stay Relevant Nokia Corporation, Finland Staying ahead of the curve requires companies to envisage more than just what the future will look like. If they are involved in innovation they must foresee how they will design and define that futu...
	Chemical Company Uses Social Media to Boost Innovation Evonik Industries, Germany Social media can be a valuable resource for companies. It can be used to: 1) Test products and services to identify any weaknesses 2) Develop solutions to those problems 3) Come up with product...
	World-Beating Green Ideas to Help the Planet Postcode Lottery, Netherlands Since 2007, the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge has been providing an open innovation contest platform to encourage and help social entrepreneurs develop innovative and sustainable products and servi...
	Open Innovation Helps the Hunt for the Universe's Missing Material NASA, United States One of open innovation’s towering strengths is that it encourages people who normally focus on problems in specific fields to apply their techniques to solving challenges in completely different dis...
	Technological Solutions to Help Prevent Human Rights Abuses Amnesty International, United Kingdom The threats posed by international terrorism have led to countries all over the world beefing up their security to protect their citizens. In some places this has come at the cost of basic human righ...
	Audi Looks to the Future of Car Production Audi, Germany For the last decade open innovation has been helping an increasing number of companies to speed up their innovation processes and get more products to market in quicker time frames. But this valuabl...
	Open Innovation at the US Department of Health and Human Services US Department of Health and Human Services, United States The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) holds a series of open innovation contests for its employees that could provide a model for other organisations. In particular, those looking to i...
	Open Innovation Provides Sanitation Solutions in Ghana CleanTeam, Ghana The lack of proper sanitation in the home and in public areas is a serious health concern in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city. Many households do not have their own toilets and the range of sani...
	Driving Innovation for Future Transport Needs Bombardier Transportation, Canada Bombardier Transportation was the first company in the rail industry to engage with open innovation when it launched a web-based contest in 2009 that invited people to share their ideas for the future...
	Fan Designed Football Kit Shows Business the Promise of Social Media Communities Olympique Marseille, France Online social media communities are playing an increasingly visible role in helping companies to ideate, innovate and solve problems. In addition, a loyal and engaged online consumer base can pay enor...

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