The Global Brain

Communities of creation, collaborative invention, joint creativity – this book explores a new innovation model, namely, open innovation. It focuses on how the practices employed to develop and market new products and services have evolved profoundly in recent years. The traditional R&D model in which the entire process is conducted in-house, from idea generation to commercial launching, is moving toward a Connect & Develop model, characterized by greater permeability between the company and its environment and the extensive use of innovation communities and networks. In this book, Satish Nambisan and Mohanbir Sawhney describe four innovation models centered around networks: the orchestra, where every participant contributes to a whole according to clearly distributed roles, the creative bazaar, where a dominant firm cherry picks from an available selection of ideas and prototypes developed by others, creative jamming, inspired by musical jam sessions, where a company asks a significant number of protagonists to improvise on a very general theme, and finally, the modernization center, where participants are invited to add their personal touch to a proposed technology, product or service, thus creating successively improved versions. In chapters 1 to 4, the authors explain that every company can benefit from playing an active role in these networks and what this role entails. Chapters 5 to 8 cover each model individually, supported with detailed examples. This book will change the way you think about innovation.