Leaving the door ajar: contests as a means to engage with the comunity.
Matthijs Den-Besten · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2009
Open innovation encompasses two seemingly orthogonal approaches that firms can adopt to engage with their surroundings. On the one hand, they can focus on long-term loyalty and try to foster a community. On the other hand, they can focus on short-term benefits and source from the crowd. In some cases the long-term objective can be reached by pursuing the short-term goals. In this paper I describe the case of one company, the Mathworks, which, I argue, has fostered a community by repeatedly courting the crowds. It did so by organizing a series of programming contests around its core product MatLab® – and in the process it didn't even have to open its MatLab source.