OSMB and Changing it 10^100
One of the most interesting things about going to conferences like OSMB is the smalltalk you do during lunch time. And today I’ve had the good luck to meet someone with an equal interest in Open Innovation. Triggered me into debunking one of the drafts I’ve pondered to long, as framework for my notes of John Lilly’s tech keynote about Mozilla. One connection is obvious, the Mozilla foundation manages to attract a lot of contributions and innovations from people outside the actual organization. Heck, even key decision-makers rest factually outside the “official” organization.
Speaking of the draft, take a peek at this Google project as another example of companies exploring open innovation (see Dell and Starbucks for other examples).
Well, Project 10100 was a call for ideas sponsored by Google in autumn 2008 to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Over 100,000 ideas were submitted and public voting will begin on March 17th, 2009. Then, an advisory board will select up to five final ideas and Google will help bring these ideas to life by committing $10 million to implement the projects. Neat …
Yes, the focus is on gathering and evaluating ideas. And while generic idea management software exists that will conduct the whole process from requesting ideas, through evaluation and into the implementation stage, I am thinking more and more about the potentials social software like e.g. wikis and (micro-)blogs offer here. Well, can’t deny being an Enterprise 2.0 consultant, can I? And this is of course an area of increasing corporate interest – in this economic situation the search for more able business models only gets stronger.
