Open innovation rests on the idea that not all the smart people work only for you, and managing human interaction across organizational boundaries is therefore central to open innovation. This article starts with outlining and reviewing research on this human dimension of open innovation. The article develops seven principles of innovation- producing encounters that can guide managers in enabling value creation through open innovation. We continue by introducing the rest of the special section, which expands beyond the human dimension to also include firms, platforms, and ecosystems, with important implications for the creation and capture of value from open innovation.

Collaborating with investor networks generated in the course of equity-based crowdfunding campaigns can contribute to the success of startup firms. Through a qualitative study of 60 European startups, this article identifies the type of inputs provided by equity investors, how these inputs are related to startups' and founders' characteristics, and startups' later performance. Startups exploiting crowd network are more likely to be successful two years later compared with startups that do not exploit the crowd, or acquire from the crowd product, strategy, or market knowledge. The findings extend existing research on the relationships between open innovation and startups by identifying the inputs provided by the crowd and how the use of crowd equity investors in open innovation platforms is related to later success.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As organizations search for better solutions to their everyday problems, many are encouraging employees to use their experiences to develop new ideas and play a more active role in the innovation process. Companies including AT&T Inc., Google Inc., and Deutsche Telekom AG have turned to what's known as internal crowdsourcing. Although external crowdsourcing, which solicits ideas from consumers, suppliers, and anyone who wants to participate, has been widely studied, internal crowdsourcing, which seeks to channel the ideas and expertise of the company's own employees, is less well-understood. However, as the authors point out, harnessing the cognitive diversity within organizations can open up rich new sources of innovation while at the same time engaging younger employees and people working on the front lines. In this article, the authors examine the benefits of internal crowdsourcing and the common roadblocks to participation, collaboration, and implementation; they draw on their research at a number of companies, including a health care company, a telecommunications company, and fashion and retail company Li & Fung Ltd. The authors present a set of action steps to help executives make their internal crowdsourcing efforts more effective. Those steps include: (1) keeping the focus broadly on long-term innovation rather than short-term problem-solving; (2) giving employees slack time to participate; (3) allowing for anonymous participation; and (4) making sure experts within the company don't exert too much influence. The authors also recommend that companies encourage collaboration, use technology platforms that connect individuals with ideas from other participants, and have well-defined procedures for how ideas will be handled after the crowdsourcing event.

Innovation contests are increasingly used by businesses to identify new ideas for better servicing their customers; yet, the degree to which the innovation contests provide new ideas has been disappointing. We describe the case of a large innovation contest via which we examined the role of three elements of the online discussion context to predict whether innovative ideas are generated during the contest. The three elements are: (1) the discussion thread's amount of variety (i.e., variation of participants' familiarity with the topic or organizational background), (2) the amount of collaborative versus argumentative posts that have been made in the discussion prior to a contributor's innovative post, and (3) whether the discussion includes previous posts from the participant prior to the innovative post. We found three ideal profiles for a person generating innovative ideas: (1) he or she posts after participants who have substantial variation in familiarity with the topic, (2) he/she posts on discussion threads in which participants focus their contributions on adding their own perspectives, not on arguing with others, and (3) he/she has not previously posted. These findings lead to specific implications for managing innovation contests.

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity.

Thousands of businesses have reengineered work to focus employees on processes that clearly provide value to customers. They have done away with their functional silos and created process-complete departments, each able to perform all the cross-functional tasks required to meet customers' needs. Although many of those efforts have paid off in the form of lower costs, shorter cycle times, and greater customer satisfaction, many others have resulted in disappointment. What went wrong? In a study of U.S. electronics manufacturers, the authors found that process-complete departments had faster cycle times than functional departments only when their managers had used one or more of four ways to cultivate collective responsibility: structuring jobs with overlapping responsibilities, basing rewards on unit performance, laying out the work area so that people can see one another's work, and designing procedures so that employees with different jobs are better able to collaborate.