Open Innovation

Open Innovation communities are web sites that enable the members to work together using “Crowdsourcing” techniques.

Defined by Henry Chesborough of Berkeley, Open Innovation is the best practice for an “open source approach” to business models. Operated by organizations such as Innocentive this enables them to harness a large community of experts for a wider reach of R&D innovations.

Public Participation and Collective Intelligence

Making government more Open doesn’t just make it more transparent for viewing purposes, it makes it more accessible for direct public participation too.

This Whitehouse report (54 page PDF) outlines a number of recommendations for how agencies can enable greater participation in government policy, in particular emphasizing the need to involve the public sooner in the process.

This large-scale participation is known as “Collective Intelligence”.

Recently MIT published a paper explaining what this is. ‘Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence‘ (20-page PDF) distills the key mechanics of this science that is also referred to as “Crowdsourcing“.

These techniques can be harnessed to achieve new, heightened levels of public engagement.