Open Innovation is necessary

Resources in the traditional ecosystem of a company appear to be insufficient for many industrial or business needs. Open Innovation is the paradigm according to which companies need to use external ideas, knowledge & technologies to advance their businessi. In particular, Open Innovation allows accelerating innovation by using most relevant external expertise and maximizes cross-fertilization between industries and between disciplines.

There is a need for intermediaries

In the context of Open Innovation, there is an increasing need of intermediaries to facilitate the connection between companies and external resources. Various types of intermediaries exist. (i) Traditional intermediaries, such as Technology Transfer Offices, clusters, boundary agentsetc., are not web-based[1] and have been around for decades. (ii) More recently, various types of web-based intermediaries appeared: crowdsourcing platforms (e.g. problem solving platforms such as Ninesigma or Innocentive), technology brokers (such as yet2.com) etc.

Open Innovation Platforms: what’s wrong?

A first common feature between crowdsourcing platforms is that all of them are registration-based: you need to register on the platform to be part of the system and participate as a problem solver, which leads to various serious issues. The second common feature is a “black box” solving process: interactions between the input (a problem) and the output (a solution) are reduced to their minimum, which leads to poor quality of solving.

Upcoming articles

In the following, we present a novel approach for Open Innovation platforms: Multistep Dynamic Expert Sourcing (MDES). This approach, developed and implemented by the French company PRESANS, avoids most of registration-based crowdsourcing platforms’ drawbacks.

The first section is an overview of the main issues with traditional registration-based crowdsourcing platforms. The second section presents the novel approach and its benefits.

The present article is after the chapter we wrote in the book “A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing: A Compendium of Best Practice, Advice and Case Studies from Leading Thinkers, Commentators and Practitioners“.


[1] Web-based: rely on technologies of the World Wide Web.