Open Innovation

The 40 Fires Foundation develops energy-efficient technology using an open source approach.

The first project is an open-source car, by sharing the schematics online the hydrogen powered car can be built using the minds of many.

Adobe is a software developer most prominent for their PDF reader, Acrobat.

Acrobat has its very own feed-back site called Acrobat.com Ideas. It is an open feedback/suggestion system that prioritizes popular ideas submitted by users through crowdsourcing.

Akvo creates and shares internet and mobile phone tools that for the first time make it easy for everyone to reach out and fund thousands of new water and sanitation projects, in some of the poorest parts of the world. This is really important, because today 2.6 billion people lack sanitation facilities and 1.1 billion still can’t access safe drinking water. Fix this, and people climb out of poverty fast.…

Akvo focuses on solving three problems through openness: – Open knowledge sharing. It runs www.akvopedia.org, an information portal designed to act as a “wikipedia for water”, which is open and free for all to use. – Find projects to fund, or find donors to fund your project. www.akvo.org is an online marketplace designed to scale to feature very large numbers of small-scale water and sanitation projects online, visible to…

The computer company allow users to interact with the iPhone API and submit their own created applications for downloading on their App Store.

By letting users interact with the open workings of the iPhone, users can create their own applications which can then be redistributed freely, subject to consideration.

Atizo connects companies with non-employee innovators. The companies and innovators collaborate to create new ideas or concepts for the company to use. The innovators who come up with the best ideas are given rewards defined by the company.

Atizo uses the tools of more traditional Open Source models and applies them to the innovation process. For example, the ideas generated in the ‘ideation phase’ are available under licences similar to CC and LGPL.

The Berkeley Innovation Forum is a community of innovation leaders that meet to exchange ideas, issues, and practices in innovation management, and to fund research of interest to the group. Through an environment of non-competing companies, BIF members explore new ways to advance the management of innovation by engaging openly with one another.

An open forum for collaborative thinking, the Berkeley Innovation Forum shows how open innovation works for practical business solutions work as well.

Colspark seeks to foster greater collaboration between academia and businesses. They strive to give college students a platform to differentiate themselves to companies. Companies can upload their challenges on to the platform and students can come up with ideas.

It’s a market place for companies and students where both benefit from participating. Companies have rights to confidentiality, while participating students can be rest assured that their intellectual property is protected. Besides it also helps students to present themselves to future employers in a new, more creative way. But most important to the platform is to create open collaborations between universities and companies.

Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell to allow Dell to measure/keep track of which ideas are most important and most relevant to the public. The name is a take-off on the word “brainstorm” and it is a way of building an online community that brings everyone closer to the creative side of technology by allowing you to share ideas and collaborate with one another. The goal is for the customer,…

Ideastorm is a place for open innovation, where people are welcome to make suggestions and feedback. The good ideas are promoted via public opinion, and are thus prioritized amongst the developers in Dell. Unfortunately it looks like Dell plays around with the voting systems, and interfears with the prioritarization processes, which makes the platform less open then it might look like at first sight. Openness here should have been about…

Within their HP Labs department Hewlett Packard opened up an open Innovation Office. HP Labs’ Open Innovation Office pursues and coordinates research collaborations with top researchers and entrepreneurs in academia, government and business around the world. It ensures joint research endeavors result in high-impact research that meets HP and its partners’ scientific and business objectives. The office consists of a global team, bringing together expertise from around the world to foster…

HP Labs Open Innovation Office is mainly about creating collaborations with external parties like researchers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Their focus is on the front end of the innovation journey, like research and possisble technology developement in which they want to partner/collaborate with external parties, not necessarily the actual development of new product/services. So openness here is about collaborating with extrenal parties in the first bit of the process.

Hubbub is a proprietary Internet application that allows businesses and organisations to attract and publish all kinds of ideas and feedback from a much wider community.

Once published on Hubbub, ideas can be universally collaborated on, voted or demoted, and eventually, in the case of the most influential, be adopted by the organisation in whole or in part.