Toyota launches their "Ideas for Good" program

On November 8th, Toyota Motor Sales, a division of the most successful auto maker in the world launched their "Ideas for Good" program. The rules are simple, between November 8th of 2010 and February 28th of 2011 everyone can pick on of the five technologies invented or perfected by Toyota and come up with a creative way of using that technology outside of automotive industry.

The technologies are as follows:

• T.H.U.M.S. (Total HUman Model for Safety)
• Solar Powered Ventilation System
• Hybrid Synergy Drive^®
• Advanced Parking Guidance System (APGS)
• Touch Tracer Display

After the submissions end, the community voting will begin and on May 9th, 2011 the winners will be announced. One of the ideas submitted by community was, for example: "Wandering Endangerment Avoidance Program" based on the Advanced Parking Guidance System (APGS). This innovation would help with people that have special needs (autism, Alzheimer, etc.) from wandering of and potentially getting hurt.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.toyota.com/ideas-for-good/

Harley-Davidson Picks Victors & Spoils (crowd sourcing) Agency

Harley-Davidson, one of the greatest American brands, is making advertising history...again. About 30 years ago a struggling Harley-Davidson went to Minneapolis based Carmichael Lynch and asked them help them regain market share they had lost to Honda and Triumph motorcycles through advertising. Carmichael said yes but required Harley to fix some 'issues' that had spoiled some of the brands reputation over the years. The results were better than either party probably ever anticipated as Harley grew to be the brand of choice for many American riders.

The economy was not been kind to the motorcycle industry who's new bike sales have dropped as much as 24% over past years.  Harley's been lucky to maintain better shares over other brands but it still is feeling the effects of the downturn. As a result of this they have branched out and found other lower cost options to fuel its advertising needs.  This ultimately lead Carmichael Lynch to walk away from the brand they resurrected so many years ago.

So the real news here is Harley-Davidson has just named the controversial, non-traditional, agency of sorts, Victor & Spoils its new lead agency. Victory & Spoils' creative department is all crowd sourced so you can imagine that this is a very unique and risky move for a premier brand to take.  I have too many words running through my mind to even start to suggest all the possible scenarios that could take place with such a monumental event as this in advertising and crowd sourcing history. 

All I have to say is Good Luck and God Speed!

Winners Announced in the "ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid"

GE & Partners announced five $100,000 award recipients in the "ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid". The Open Innovation opportunity asked for people to submit smart, clean power grid solutions. A panel of judges from inside and outside of GE, including Wired Magazines editor Chris Anderson, reviewed almost 4,000 entries and narrowed it down to five winners.

Find more information on the winning ideas visit:www.ecomagination.com/announcements

While I found many of the entries amazing ideas, I wanted to share one idea I can't wait to hear more about.

How Open is Wikileaks?

A quick glance at wikileaks.org may lead newshounds to the conclusion that the Wikileaks mission statement involves exposure of secret societies, cults, and governments somewhere in the preamble. On the other hand, Wikileaks itself often claims to act more like a receptacle for the varying and unique submissions of people around the globe.

If you're not familiar, here's how it works: When any individual thinks the public at large should be aware of some piece of privatized information, they can submit that information to Wikileaks, in an effort to expose the secret to the world. Wikileaks claims not to solicit such submissions beyond making their inbox and mailboxes available; on the other hand, it does edit and evaluate the information for content that it deems "important." Moreover, it seems to walk a tightrope between allowing and disallowing the input of parties involved (i.e.: refusing to comply with cease-and-desist demands from Swiss banks, vs. inviting the Pentagon to join them in evaluation of the Iraq War Diaries).

Given the fact that Wikileaks evaluates all submissions, just how open of a project would you label it? In any case, I doubt anyone would argue that it is not innovative.

Here are some quotes from Wikileaks spokesperson and developer, Julian Assange, that could provide you with some insight into that question:

"WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon." Khatchadourian, Raffi, "No Secrets", The New Yorker, June 9, 2010.

"Seeing ongoing political reforms that have a real impact on people all over the world is extremely satisfying. But we want every person who's having a dispute with their kindergarten to feel confident about sending us material." Kushner, David, "Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory", Mother Jones, April 6, 2010.

Is Open Innovation just for Technology Companies?

Available for pre-orders on Amazon.com

Open innovation is said to have started in the technology sector, but it is no longer the only industry that utilizes it principles. Consumer packaged goods companies like General Mills and Procter & Gamble are utilizing it. And I even recently read the financial industry has been incorporating this into their business plans.

What about the service industry? The new book coming out this January called Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era, (Jossey Bass, 2011), by Henry Chesbrough’s will talk about using the open innovation business model in the service industry as a growth strategy.

Dr. Henry Chesbrough is a contributor to the website, Open Innovation Community, and more importantly coined the term open innovation. He has written several books on the subject and is a guru on innovation models that drive transformation and growth. Dr. Chesbrough is also the Executive Director for the Center of Open Innovation at Berkley University

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Google Chrome in the Clouds: Litterally

I read an interesting article the other day; Google has teamed up with three major airlines and plans to offer Google Chrome and free in-flight internet service during the holiday season. Google has signed a deal with Delta, AirTran and Virgin America to provide free Gogo inflight Internet access to passengers November 20^th through January 2^nd of 2011. The service will be available on more than 700 planes and allow customers to surf the web and check email. This looks like a pretty big deal for Google, I guess we will have to wait and see how it all pans out.

The role of community in the open innovation idea.

In their paper, Joel West and Karim R Lakhani, entitled "Getting Clear About
Communities in Open Innovation" raise few interesting points.

First of all, they try to define what a "community" is based on prior research. Although, ultimately they decide that:
"Here we do not attempt to impose a single definition of “community” applicable to all innovation studies. Instead, we encourage researchers to explicitly articulate the theoretical and phenomenological boundaries of their use of the term, both to build upon earlier scholarship and to enable subsequent scholars to build on them."

Then, they go more into relationship between communities and various firms, as well as intra-community interaction. They focus on the fact that these are highly dependable on the ability of finding a common goal by both sides.

Lastly, they discuss a role of communities in Open Innovation. They agree that "prior research has identified the importance of individuals, firms, networks, industries and nations upon open innovation"; however, they also admit that the role of community has been growing in recent years but seems to be forgotten.

Full text of the article is available here:
http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestLakhani2008-WP.pdf

Open Source vs. Free Software

To understand the differences and the issues associated with Open Source and Free Software, one must first understand what differentiates the two. The official definition of “open source software” was indirectly derived from the criteria of “free software”. Which most people think of as say a free beer or to mean free copies of software, which would be wrong. Free software and the free software movement really pertain to the freedom to run it, to study it and change, and to redistribute copies with or without changes.

The freedom of software movement began and has campaigned for computer user’s freedom since 1983. In 1984 they launched the development of the GNU free operating system to avoid the non-free operating systems that were denying their freedom. During the 1980’s the GNU developed most of the essential components of the system and designed the GNU General Public License (GNUGPL) to release them under. However, not all of the user/developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement and 1998 splintered off and began the “open source” campaign. The term open source was originally used to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding associated with the term “free software,” it later became associated with philosophical views which conflicted with those of free software.

Nearly all open source software is free software. The terms describe almost the same category of software. However, their views are based on fundamentally different values. Simply put, open source is a development methodology, while free software is a social movement. Today, tens of millions of people worldwide use free software. Public schools in some of the regions of India and Spain teach students to use the GNU/Linux operating system. However, most of the these users have never heard of the ethical reasons why GNU developed the operating system and built the free software community, because today the system and community are more often spoke of as “open source”, attributing them to a different philosophy of freedoms which are hardly ever mentioned if at all.

So in the end does it matter whether it’s called free software or open source? In my opinion, no, because the terms are used interchangeably, the term “open source” is used by some people to mean the same as “free software” and vice versa.

Great for freelancers, thinkers, and innovators!

Last week in class we had a special guest speaker. He briefly talked about a great new social platform called ideablender when he was talking about crowd sourcing and how his group has used it. I looked ideablender up and was very excited about what they are doing.

So what exactly is ideablender?

Simply defined, ideablender is a social solution development company that connects companies, academic institutions, public sector, and non-profit organizations with a global network of some of the brightest thinkers to solve tough business challenges.

Learn more about ideablender:

Website
http://www.ideablender.com/

Follow them on twitter @blenderlounge
http://twitter.com/blenderlounge

Find them on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/ideablenderpage


Our speaker, Eric, talked about a new opportunity ideablender was working on promoting called the Chicago Storm Water Challenge. Chicago’s Water Management group is looking to improve upon the current Flow Restrictor, Vortex Restrictor, being used in residential catch basins. The opportunity is a public crowd sourcing challenge open to engineers, problem solvers, and institutions like Universities. Check out the website to see an example of what they are helping people do through crowd sourcing and to learn more about the challenge.

Chicago Storm Water Challenge
http://www.ideablender.com/water/


Crowd Sourcing
I have mixed feeling about crowd sourcing. I like it because it can be a great opportunity to connect the right talent with the right companies. I am more open to the idea now than I have been in the past because of the Open Innovation movement. I think people should get paid to do work so I cringe a little when I find a craigslist ads for a company looking for people to submit their ideas for their company website and they will get back to the people with the ones they like the best. This type of Crowd Sourcing is not a good idea except for a few maybe new graduates but you get what you pay for in the end. I was impressed with Chicago’s Storm Water Challenge because it paid 10,000 for all ideas that were solid enough to make it into the conception phase and was awarding a contract for $3-$10 million dollars for the actual work. This will be one opportunity to watch over the next few months.

What are your thoughts on Crowd Sourcing? Would you spend your time working on ideas that might not see any return? Do you think this is a fad and will eventually fade away or do you think this is a growing trend here to stay?

Naomi Synstelien
(...wishing I was a Civil Engineer so I could design water solutions for this challenge)