Crowdsourcing and co-creation are resources used by companies to look for external ideas. They try to develop new products by asking the crowd. There is a lot of potential for innovation in passionate groups of people. In this famous TED talk, Chris Anderson speaks of crowd accelerated innovation. He also discusses the impact of new forms of transmission of knowledge and skills, such as video, on innovation.
The Internet has made possible new forms of organization and collaboration that foster innovation, even among scientific communities (there are examples in the video).
Making crowd accelerated innovation possible
According to Anderson, there are three elements that make this crowd accelerated innovation possible:
- Crowd: Groups of people who share common interests. The more they are, the more the potential for innovation.
- Light: People’s ideas need visibility. This is the way how ideas can be improved and the crowd can learn, participate and shed light.
- Desire: It is the potential for coming up with new ideas. Also, for making the crowd grow, especially since innovation means a lot of work and practice.
These three elements that make posible crowd accelerated innovation are also present in Open Innovation platforms, allowing to accelerate innovation.
