Open Innovation
SUCCESS STORIES

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

	Students Deliver World-Class Solutions in Global Innovation Challenge Innovation Challenge, United States Getting some of the best student minds in the world to work on pressing business and social innovation challenges is the intent of the annual Global Innovation Challenge. For more than ten years this...
	Novel Sustainable Living Solutions from the Dow Solar Design to Zero Competition Dow Chemical Company, United States A versatile, cost-effective, and elegant living space for residential and commercial occupancy, covered by solar panels and that can pay for itself in less than 14 years was the winner of the Dow Sola...
	Open Innovation Search for Innovate Diabetes Solutions Sanofi-Aventis US, United States To build on the success of its 2011 open innovation competition to look for innovative concepts to make life easier for people living with diabetes, Global healthcare provider Sanofi US once again tu...
	Boosting the Pace of Scientific Discovery with Open Innovation Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany In its search for a model to accurately predict the biological responses of molecules, pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim turned to an online science community to ask it to come up with an al...
	Sneaker Company Experiments with Filtering the Crowd Simple Shoes, United States Simple Shoes is a Santa Barbara sneaker company that in 2010 experimented with a crowdsourcing contest that challenged freelance creative professionals to outperform a creative agency. 'Simple Shoe...
	How Open Innovation Can Shake-Up Auditing and Accounting TeamMate, United States Yes, open innovation can accelerate the pace of innovation, design better products and services and provide access to good and perhaps even better ideas. But its potential isn't just confined to R&D a...
	Speech Therapy Apps Benefit from an Open Innovation Approach Smarty Ears, United States Smarty Ears is a developer of iPad apps for speech therapy and communication and uses open innovation to increase the number of ideas it gets to market and to accelerate the product development cycle....
	On the Road with the UK’s First Crowdsourced Car Citroen, France According to motor giant Citroen its C1 Connexion is the UK’s first crowdsourced car. Featuring the slogan ‘You like it, we make it’ the car company collaborated with Facebook on an app th...
	Crowdsourcing to Create Better Futures in Minnesota Minnesota Community Foundation, United States Inspired by the open innovation and crowdsourcing endeavors of others such as MyStarbucks.com and the X Prize Foundation, the Minnesota Community Foundation decided to get its own project underway to
	Lego Cuusoo: Innovating with the Crowd Lego, Denmark Lego is an open innovation pioneer, one of the first companies to develop practices and platforms to engage external contributors to innovation processes. Being open to the ideas of others has helped...
	Co-Creation with Children Brings New Product to Market Kellogg Company, United States Co-creation is the open innovation approach that is now the focus of increasing attention from the business community as companies seek to capitalize on the intelligence and creativity of their consum...
	Volvo Co-Creates an SUV with Consumers Volvo, Sweden When co-creating with the crowd a company needs to decide how involved it wants outsiders to be, whether they are going to help with a specific one-off challenge or maintain a continuous presence thro...
	Crowdsourcing Game Design Energises Consumers Putter King LLC, Japan The relationships between brands and their audiences are evolving as fans, followers and customers have the time, inclination and desire to become involved at a deeper level with their favourite compa...
	Co-Creating with Consumers Generates Wins for Kraft Foods Kraft Foods, United States The emergence of co-creation as a new form of open innovation engagement with consumers is a trend that is becoming hard to ignore. For product development, innovation and strategic thinking it can h...
	Going for Gold with Open Innovation DSM, Netherlands Multinational life sciences and materials sciences-based company DSM launched an open innovation contest in 2011 that invited creative thinkers and innovators to design a sporting innovation using the...
	The Crowd Remakes a Movie Classic Starwarsuncut.com, United States The evil Galactic Empire hasn’t seen anything like it. The force is with the crowd as Star Wars fans from all over the world have created a complete crowdsourced version of the 1977 sci-fi classic
	Crowdfunding Community Projects Spacehive, United Kingdom For cash strapped cities suffering from ever shrinking budgets, the crowds and their pockets are coming to the rescue. In an age of austerity, urban loving and enterprising individuals are employing...
	Philips Reaps the Benefits of Collaborating with Consumers Philips, Netherlands To make the most of co-creating with consumers companies should view the practice as much more than market research, and engage the crowd in meaningful ways. Using it as simply a marketing exercise o...
	Big Ideas to Boost Innovation in Africa Open Innovation Africa Summit (OIAS²), Kenya There is no shortage of innovators and creative talents across the African continent. However, there are a number of factors that make it more difficult for their innovations and ideas to see the lig...
	Nivea Co-Creates with the Crowd to Eliminate Stain Problem Nivea, Germany The concept of co-creation, seeking ideas and information from a group of people to help develop a product is an offshoot of open innovation and crowdsourcing, and typically involves consumers in nich...
	Open Innovation Gets Your Motor Running Factory Five, United States One of the many advantages of open innovation is that a company can tap into a deep well of knowledge, passion and enthusiasm of members of the crowd wherever they may be in the world. Provided parti...
	How Swarovski Capitalized on the Crowd Swarovski, Austria Embarking on open innovation opportunities with customers offers a company or brand new thinking, fresh perspectives, untapped ideas and publicity. Swarovski the cut crystal and luxury products ret...
	Open Innovation Approach to keep Track of Anything Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom, HYVE and RWTH Aachen University, Germany M2M (machine to machine communications) is considered to be an emerging field where state-of-the-art communications technology allows devices to communicate with each other. As such it is ripe for op...
	Smart Ideas for Plastics Processing Reifenhauser, Germany Idea contests have given the world many new ideas and novel concepts. They’ve helped us navigate the high seas (thanks to John Harrison’s marine chronometer) sent numerous planes and airships acr...
	Building a Local House with the 100 Mile Home Ideas Contest Architecture Foundation of British Columbia, Canada If you want environmental, technical or economic issues tackled just call on the crowd for swift, innovative and cost effective solutions. The crowd is used to solve a large variety of challenges w...
	Ingenious Solutions for Security Challenges Global Security Challenge - 2011, United Kingdom Every year the Global Security Challenge awards over $500,000 to entrepreneurs and innovators in the security fields who come up with ideas, technologies and innovations that make airports, cities and...
	Show Off Your Apps with the National Library of Medicine National Library of Medicine (NLM), United States Apps contests have the potential to transform seemingly dry data sets that barely see the light of day into ingenious programs that can provide better public services, easier access to information, a...
	Creating a Green World with Open Innovation ScrapLab, Thailand The beauty of crowdsource design contests is that they provide a platform for creative types to showcase their talents, which can generate unique ideas and concepts at low cost that in some instances
	Can $300 Change the World? Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar, United States It began as a challenge on a blog post on the ‘Harvard Business Review’ and thanks to a huge response from the public grew into a collection of 300 design submissions from all over the planet.
	Vodafone Americas Foundation Announces 2012 Wireless Innovation Project Winners Vodafone Americas Foundation, United States Three Groundbreaking Mobile Innovations Target Critical Issues in Agriculture, Healthcare and Developing Economies The Vodafone Americas Foundation and mHealth Alliance are pleased to announce the...
	Crowdsource Computer Game to Help Solve Global Health Problems University of Washington, United States Proteins are the building blocks of life, but they also play a part in many illnesses and conditions. Determining their structure is vital to understand the mechanisms by which diseases are caused an...
	Siemens Smart Grid Innovation Contest Siemens, Germany In 2005 the European Union adopted the Smart Grid concept to improve on energy efficiency and cut down on waste. But the power grids face a number of challenges, not least of which is an insufficient...
	Open Innovation Fuels BMW’s Ideation Process BMW, Germany For car giant BMW, open innovation offers plenty of opportunities to increase its product pipeline and to integrate external ideas into its ideation process. One of its innovation approaches is the...
	Open Innovation Gives Bus Stop a Makeover University of Utah/Utah Transit Authority, United States Crowdsourcing is a useful tool to gather ideas and concepts from diverse sources. Typically, participation is open to all and the crowd is usually characterized by several recognizable features: it i...
	The US Navy Taps the Crowd to Combat Marine Piracy The Office of Naval Research, United States There is a piracy crisis on the high seas, and according to many commentators it’s getting worse. Highly sophisticated pirate crews use the latest hi-tech equipment to locate and board ships and ta...
	Global Company’s Strong Bonds with Open Innovation Henkel, Germany When personal and home care company Henkel wanted innovative ideas and designs for packaging of its consumer adhesive products it appealed to the crowd for inspiration. Henkel’s ‘Adhesive Packa...
	Energy Efficient Managing and Transportation of Water Imagine H20, United States Non profit organization Imagine H20 has coordinated a number of open innovation initiatives to uncover cutting edge solutions to tricky water problems. One of those was the 2010 Water-Energy Nexus Co...
	Open Innovation in the Airfreight Industry is a Runway Success Lufthansa Cargo, Germany Open innovation is a powerful catalyst for radical thinking as Lufthansa Cargo is well aware of. The global cargo airline wanted to benefit from the wisdom of crowd to help reduce its environmental i...
	Zazzle’s Million Dollar Open Innovation Challenge Zazzle, United States If there’s one thing guaranteed to catch attention it’s a headline promising $1 million worth of prizes. The Zazzle Million Dollar Open Innovation Challenge offered just that and was a global sea...
	Pan European Challenge to Build Dream Apps from Public Data Open Knowledge Foundation, United Kingdom The Open Data Challenge was Europe’s biggest public data competition with a grand total of 20,000 Euros (approx. USD $27,000) worth of prize money up for grabs. It was organised by the Open Knowled...
	Tackling the Diabetes Epidemic with Open Innovation Sanofi-Aventis, United States Diabetes is an epidemic that is on the rise. In the US alone more than 1 in 4 Americans is affected by the disease. The overall cost to US healthcare is $2.6 trillion (this equates to about $21,000 p...
	Open Innovation Gets Dutch Company Out of a Sticky Situation DSM, Netherlands E-850 is an adhesive resin developed by scientists at DSM, a global science company involved in health, nutrition and materials. The resin is the main component of one of the company’s glues used w...
	To Boldly Go Where No Code Has Gone Before NASA, United States With the vast expanse of the Universe, and the sheer volume of data beamed back from telescopes and robotic missions, space scientists need all the help they can get to enable them to better explore w...
	Nokia’s Global Search for a New Ringtone Nokia Corporation, Finland It is one of the world’s most recognised tunes, and is heard at least one billion times a day. But even so, Nokia wanted to ring in the changes with a fresh version of its classic tune, ‘Grand Val...
	Scientists Ask the Crowds for Cash #The SciFund Challenge, United States In order to carry out research, scientists need funding, and the conventional way to get funding is to apply for a grant from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or pri...
	How Dunkin’ Donuts Uses Open Innovation to Get Ahead Dunkin' Donuts, United States Open innovation, particularly via crowdsourcing competitions has a number of food companies licking their lips for the opportunity they provide to connect with customers, receive product ideas at a co...
	Mind-Blowing Ideas from Open Innovation Zyxsio, United States When Zyxio, a start-up human media interaction company developed a new breath control technology it asked the crowd for ideas on how the innovation could be used. Their patented technology is calle...
	DHL’s Search for Cutting Edge Logistics Solutions 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...
	Open Innovation Tunes into Whale Song 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...
	A Full-Length Opera Devised, Developed and Designed by the Crowd 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...
	No Chance of Destroying the Evidence with DARPA’s Shredder Challenge 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...
	How the Crowd is Helping with Problems in the Classroom 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...
	Phenomenal Global Response to World Bank Innovation Contest 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...
	Creating New Laws with the Crowd 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.
	Global Contest to Promote Economic Opportunity 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...
	A Major Food Brand's Appetite for Open Innovation Smith's Snackfood Company, Australia ...
	Open Innovation Takes Chile By Storm 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...
	The Race to Build a Super Efficient Eco-Friendly Car 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
	Open Innovation Throws the Environment a Lifeline 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...
	Open Innovation Contest for Tech-Savvy Citizens 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 Turns to Crowdsourcing to Promote Snack Food Brand 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
	Crowdfunding Platform to Educate Children Wins Hackathon 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...
	Crowdsourcing Goes Up in the World: DARPA Balloon Hunt 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).
	Crowdsourcing Project Exposes Politicians' Wrong Doings 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...
	Crowdsourcing to Understand the Molecules of Life 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
	Crowdsourcing Apps to Make a Difference 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 Scoop on Crowdsourcing 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...
	Open Innovation Leads to Medical Device Breakthroughs 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...
	Crowdsourcing Contest Winner to Help New York City's Commuters 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...
	Airlines Crowdsource New Products with the General Public 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...
	Pooling Intelligence to Deal with Global Warming 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
	Supermarket Chain Crowdsources with Customers 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...
	Crowdsourcing to Make a City Cool 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...
	The World’s First Crowdsourced Military Vehicle 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...
	Crowdsourcing Down on the Farm 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...
	GreenBook: A New Chapter in Environmental Participation 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...
	Apps for Africa 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...
	Crowdsourcing Competition to Inspire Russian Innovation Skolkovo Foundation, Russia 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...
	Crowdsourcing Contest Offers $3 Million Prize 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...
	Random Hacks of Kindness 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
	Apps to Help the Poor to Help Themselves 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,...
	Crowdsourcing Competition to Reduce and Eliminate Waste 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...
	Crowdsourcing Challenge to Find Innovative Ways to Air Dry Clothes 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...
	Crowdsourcing, Potato Chips and Healthy Sales Figures 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...
	Crowdsourcing Climate Change Solutions 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...
	From Concepts to Products in Under 48 Hours 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...
	Global Innovation Jam to Design a Brand New Service 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...
	Apps for Healthy Kids 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...
	Finding Solutions to India’s Sanitation Problems 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...
	Empowering Women in the Developing World 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...
	CivicApps for Greater Portland 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...
	Global Search for Healthcare Ideas 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...
	App My Ride 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...
	Haiti Earthquake Disaster Inspires Open Innovation Contest 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....
	Open Innovation Revs Up the Car Industry 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...
	Car Giant adopts Open Innovation to get into the Fast Lane 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...
	Open Innovation Contest to Design a More Efficient Apartment 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 Mio, the World's First Crowdsourced Car 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...
	Open Innovation to Rebuild an Economy 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
	Crystal Clear Advantages of Open Innovation Swarovski, Austria 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...

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