Originally posted at Trends in the Living Network on July 26th, 2010

MyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.

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When talking about crowdsourcing, co-creation and innovation, very rarely do “baby boomers” enter the conversation as the target audience. However, a new Neilson report sheds light on the untapped potential of this populous generation. Interestingly, over 1/3 of users online are Boomers. Moreover, they use the same communication and social media platforms as younger adults. They are, on average, more affluent than Millennials and spend online readily. Leveraging, measuring interest, and co-creating with this generation via crowdsourcing is a great way to both engage and build your brand with Boomers. Here are a few ideas the Chaordix team has thought up for how the boomer and beyond demographic might be leveraged as a crowdsourcing community.
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Originally posted at Innovation Leadership Network on July 8, 2010

I’ve just finished reading a nice article on IP strategy and open innovation that was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review last year. It’s worth reading because the authors, Oliver Alexy, Paula Criscuolo and Ammon Salter have been doing research in this area for a while and now have a good corpus of evidence about how to successfully manage open innovation. I’ve written a blog post previously on one of Ammon’s papers where he talks about the Gollum effect, where obsessive IP protection shuts down the possibilities for valuable innovation partnerships.

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This last week, an independently organized TEDX-style convention was held in Washington, DC. TEDxOilSpill began on Monday with the sole purpose to bring to focus possible solutions for the 40,000 barrel-a-day problem in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bringing together expert opinion and broadcasting globally, the conference was the product of the crowd trying to do what a government, tied down with bureaucracy, and a private company, clearly stretched beyond capacity, could not.

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“The map is not the territory” – Korzybski

In 2006, I visited Kyoto for the first time. After walking a couple of kilometers, I realized I was far from my intended destination. Without a map, I was lost. Only after retracing my steps did I realize the map I had seen was not oriented North/South. On this map, North was down and to the right – clearly to the cartographer, another perspective was more important to emphasize.

To solve complex problems, innovators go through a similar process of wayfinding and navigating. To innovate solutions to problems we haven’t seen before, we often need to learn to see old things in new ways. Converging on the true nature of the problem, navigating ambiguity and uncovering the insights that drive innovative solutions, we need to become more comfortable leaving old maps behind and finding new ways of navigating.

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