Modular Crowd Workflows for Open Innovation

Enterprises struggle with today’s innovation problems, and the traditional methods of so-called “closed innovation” no longer seem to work. In view of this, organizations often attempt a shift into more open ways of innovating. Crowdsourcing has proved to be a powerful tool in assisting the creative process, and at the same time, an innovative labor model with which companies have begun experimenting in the context of open innovation (OI). Currently, these methods have proved to be an effective alternative for organizations to obtain new knowledge or ideas, but their success is accompanied by many challenges. Following an OI contest, companies receive thousands of ideas of high variability and redundancy. Typically, these ideas are (1) hard to filter and synthesize into innovative solutions, and (2) radically innovative ideas from the crowd are often internally rejected, early in the process, due to their low maturity levels. In this chapter, we perform an extensive literature review to identify research gaps and challenges that hinder the efficient involvement of the crowds in later steps of the innovation processes, after the initial ideation stage. Based on this review, we propose a design recommendation framework based on modular workflows, to involve crowds in OI processes more efficiently. Our framework is based on the idea that no one size fits all; rather the way that the crowds should be involved has to do with the needs and capacities of each specific organization. Only when such degree of involvement is achieved can the companies fully exploit the benefits of OI and crowdsourcing. We conclude by demonstrating the usage of this framework on two indicative use case scenarios, and propose future work.