A Roadmap for Open Innovation Systems

Open innovation systems have provided organizations with unprecedented access to the “wisdom of the crowd,” allowing them to collect candidate solutions for problems they care about, from potentially thousands of individuals, at very low cost. These systems, however, face important challenges deriving, ironically, from their very success: they can elicit such high levels of participation that it becomes very challenging to guide the crowd in productive ways, and pick out the best of what they have created. This article reviews the key challenges facing open innovation systems and proposes some ways the research community can move forward on this important topic.