Business - Written Tuesday, March 11, 2008 by Don Tapscott - 0 Comments

A Heineken with my Lego: Building expertise through collective innovation

We’ve talked a lot about big companies reaching outside the traditional corporate boundaries in order to get that talent they need to drive innovation, and it’s a theme that’s increasingly being covered throughout the mainstream press. However, the focus generally continues to be on finding that one, uniquely qualified mind to tackle a particular problem – think “rogue scientist” attracted to the GoldCorp Challenge, Innocentive, etc. Such Ideagoras are not bad things by any stretch of the imagination, but there are other ways to drive innovation as well.

As Kerry Capell reported in Business Week last week, the Raymond Conference decided to take a different angle on open innovation this year: focus on fostering cooperation between design teams at big global companies in radically different markets. Think: Heineken, Lego, Philips, Hewlett Packard, and others coming together… what might they come up with? Continue…