Managing complexity : Markku Markkula, President of the European Commission of the Regions, has developed a synthesis idea for governance.
The idea is really not new: "Wisdom comes from the people." Collective intelligence to manage large social systems and globalization. Formez has been doing it for some time
Open innovation systems have provided organizations with unprecedented access. The “wisdom of the crowd” has been allowed to gather solutions for the problems that concern – potentially thousands of people – and at very low cost. These systems, however, face major challenges resulting, ironically, from their excessive success: they can elicit such high levels of participation that it becomes very difficult to productively guide the public to choose the best of what they have created.
CATALYST and its partners have launched a research experiment on Collective Intelligence based on the experience of each of the associates.
A scientific paper on open innovation systems was written by Mark Klein (MIT / University of Zurich, catalyst consortium partner) e Gregory Convertinus and was published March 12, 2015, in the special issue of the JJournal of Social Media for Organizations, Volume 1, number 2, dedicated to the large-scale conception of open data and its deliberation.
Open systems of innovation are directly linked to collective intelligence as they allow for the gathering and participation of thousands of individuals and sources. While access to collective intelligence can be a real advantage, it can also be difficult to channel such a high level of participation and to obtain the best possible result of crowd-thought. The article goes through the main challenges that open innovation systems face and provides answers on the ways in which the research community is able to move forward on this important topic. Semi-formalized structures, micro-activities, attention to mediation, etc., all these concepts are solutions such as idea filtering, idea evaluation or even understanding coverage.
What are Open Innovation systems?
“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” – Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy (Lakhani and Panetta, 2007)
During World War II, the dominant model for innovation in many large organizations, especially in the private sector, was shut down in at least two ways (Chesbrough, 2003). In the first place, excluding sources external to the organizations; a “do it all yourself” model (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2008). Secondly, innovation within the organization was also relegated to a limited number of roles even for innovation and technology transfer managers. This model excluded most employees, as well as customers, partners and other stakeholders in the organization, who remained an untapped resource.
In 2004, for example, R&D employees accounted for 3.8% of total US employees, implying that 96% of employees were not engaged in innovation for the organization.
open innovation, systems1, has represent a promising emerging approach to address this important limitation. In such systems, a customer (e.g., a corporate executive or a leader in a government agency), describes a problem they want to solve (e.g., “we want ideas for new beverage products”) and provides an online tool that potentially allows thousands of people to present solutions and criticisms, even to the proposals of others. In some cases, these systems frame the effort as a contest, where the winning ideas receive a prize, financial or otherwise. They therefore allow an organization to extend its sources of innovation at very low cost and to include a much wider selection of its employees, as well as customers and suppliers. Open systems of innovation are different from related groupware technologies, such as brainstorming (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003), or argumentation (Klein, 2007; Moor & Aakhus, 2006), and group decisions support the systems along the dimensions scale criticisms of users and stakeholders, and this is the purpose of the system. Groupware systems are aimed at enabling collaboration and problem solving with small to medium-sized groups (i.e., where membership typically ranges from 3 to 30 people), while open innovation systems are aimed at enable innovation through mass (e.g., typically in the order of thousands of participants). Open systems of innovation result in an enlarged scale of users and a more limited focus of criticalities.
This is a good use of open data. One could object to a profile of mass exploitation but where there is participation, exploitation becomes a return of interest from and for the mass and therefore becomes utility.
The search for alliances, then, takes the lion's share of the open data system, allowing for that collaboration which up to now has always been tiring and expensive. Transparency does the rest…
So the open data system creates the structure and culture for participation and seems to be the best cure for the fragmentation of times and uncontrolled globalization, allowing for analyzes and synthesis that would otherwise be difficult to reach.
This is the philosophy which the President of the European Commission for the Regions also advocates (Cor), Deputy Director of the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG).
The regions of Europe could create major problems for governance with their diversity and the open data system creates solutions for management.
When there is a large social block, the only way is to 'Open' to ideas. The Italian government has also been applying this scheme for some time with public consultations through the website of the Formez ← link to site
