Supporting Collective Creativity within Open Innovation

Dynamic and turbulent business environment with constant interventions of new technological, social and management innovations force the companies to seek new ways to bind the existing customers more tightly in the innovation process and at the same time, to attract new customers. The fierce competition of customer attention forces companies to create new attractive value creation methods to distinct from masses. Customizing products and services according to customer preferences might do the job for most of the customers but some advanced and enthusiastic customers want to have even more influence on defining process. Open innovation is a new emerging paradigm that includes close collaboration with customers in the innovation process, not just in defining the product features from predefined set of alternatives. Recent studies emphasize the need to support of collective creativity instead of individual creativity. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore what motivates customers to collaborate in the innovation process and how this process can be enhanced by offering appropriate tools. A literature review of motivations to participate in online communities is presented and thereafter certain commercial web-based services supporting community collaboration and brokering are illustrated. These cases are also contrasted with Web 2.0 business models to find out what kinds of information systems and toolkits should be used in different communities with different members’ motivations.