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OVERVIEW: Forget Linux, Netflix, DARPA, and the X Prizes. Deliberate, managed open innovation goes back 300 years. At that time the determination of longitude at sea was both vitally important and apparently impossible; so having failed with a team of experts, Parliament sought solutions from a wider field via the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a prize of 20,000 £ for a method of determining longitude to within 30 miles, to be proven on a voyage from Britain to the West Indies. The Act established a Board of Longitude to manage submissions, decide upon the prize, and, if necessary, grant additional money to support an inventor's progress. The process created for the administration of the Longitude prize remains as relevant today as any modern prize-based example. KEYWORDS: Open innovation, Innovation prizes, Longitude prize, On the night of October 22, 1707, a fleet of Royal Navy warships was homeward bound in wind and rain. Far off course, they struck the rocks of the Scilly [...]

OVERVIEW: Thanks to Internet technology and social media, voluntary challenges and forums have become a widespread form of collaboration for business; examples include Wikipedia, Innocentive, and many internal corporate systems. Participation in these systems follows the same pattern across industries and public forums, at scales from dozens to millions of contributors. This pattern--a long tail of participation, with a few very active contributors and many occasional contributors--is very different from behavior in internal business teams. The universality of this model has important implications for mass collaboration initiatives; its parameters are easily known, which makes it straightforward to predict participation and project whether the content generated will represent a minority or majority opinion. The factors that affect these parameters are also known, although our ability to influence them is often limited. Networks and communities may be involved but are not necessary; it may be more accurate to say that input comes from an audience of individual contributors. Because these results are very different from what is expected of traditional business teams, managers considering social collaboration initiatives should take note. KEYWORDS: Participation, Collaboration, Social media, Long tail, Power law, Networks, Internet technology and familiarity with social media make it easy to broadcast messages to hundreds and thousands of employees, suppliers, or customers; the optimistic visions of The Wisdom of Crowds [...]

In Science Business (2006), Gary Pisano dissects the 30-year-old biotech industry, noting its poor track record of investor returns with time-and-cost metrics no different from the consistently more profitable large [...]

Mr. Darcy is the perfect dog: a two-year-old male Black Lab with boundless happy energy. He camps out by the glass kitchen door, and when a squirrel walks by outside, [...]

In his 2006 book Science Business, Gary Pisano defined three elements of the business environment that a science- or technology-based business must master to survive: speed of change, complexity, and [...]

As a very modern manager and reader of RTM, you know that your business teams would benefit from more diverse, timely, and expert knowledge than they could possibly have internally [...]

We generally think of business success or failure in human terms: management is brilliant or flawed, rises to opportunities or overlooks them, takes risks or plays it safe. The sky's [...]

Welcome to Reality Check. In this column, I'll paint provocative pictures for innovation managers based on snippets from science, history, demographics, and respected business observers. As an experimental scientist, I [...]

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration; Keith Sawyer; Basic Books, NY, 2007; 274pp., $26.95. If you're involved in a business that depends on sustained innovation (and which doesn't?)--especially if [...]

I have been reading SUCCESS magazine and enjoying the Bonus CDs for a couple of years now. The Reinvention issue [August] featuring Brian Tracy on the CD was the best [...]