Traditional, in-house innovation activity has a limited effect in an organisation. Open Innovation paradigm emphasises external resources and their importance in organisations’ innovation activity. A new organisation type called intermediary is emerging. InnoCentive, FellowForce and InnovationXchange are examples of these intermediaries. Intermediaries act like Internet-based innovation marketplaces enabling companies and innovators to buy and sell IP (Intellectual Property) as well as to develop ideas collaboratively to the level of innovation. Crowdsourcing is one of the practices utilised by intermediaries.

Currently I and my colleagues at the Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere, are conducting research on Open Innovation. We started with future research, a Delphi expert panel integrating leading researchers in the open innovation area. Currently, a web-based survey is targeted to intermediaries and their customers. Innovators and their motivational factors, interests and creative problem-solving methods are inspected in this survey. The preliminary results indicate that reasons to participate in ideating are versatile and both monetary and non-monetary rewards needs to be carefully planned to support collective creativity.

This research is part of Tekes (http://www.tekes.fi) funded Parteco project which is focused on social media and participatory economics. In the Hypermedia Laboratory this research closely links to our open source software (OSS) research area. The research findings from OSS communities and their motivational factors have similarities with intermediary communities.

Mikko Ahonen is a researcher at the Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere, Finland. He graduated from the Faculty of Education, University of Tampere. Therefore, he is interested in connections of creativity, learning and information systems. Before university, he worked at Telecom and IT industry. Currently he is preparing his information systems PhD about brokering and learning within open innovation. Blog: http://beyondcreativity.blogs.com