Idea in a bottle – A new method for creativity in Open Innovation
Matthias Rudolf Guertler, Christopher Münzberg, Udo Lindemann · 2013
This paper presents an approach to increase the creativi-ty of ideas/solutions in an idea contest. Analog to a let-ter in a bottle tasks are distributed in a randomized way to potential problem solvers. The idea contest is a method from Open Innovation which opens a compa-ny’s innovation process to its environment (e.g. cus-tomers, suppliers). By using idea contests the creative potential of a large crowd of people can be used for de-veloping innovative solutions for a specific task. Never-theless, based on experience from industry projects we found that creativity often is limited. This paper pre-sents an approach for increasing the creative potential of participants. The new integrated method combines idea contest with lead user’s methods and aspects from synectics and communication.