What Do Sweat and Beer Bring to Open Innovation Challenges?
Open challenges are becoming an essential part of open innovation processes. Companies and non-profit institutions like universities publicly describe a problem and whoever has an idea can propose solutions.
Online open challenges can easily be set up, it only takes a few key strokes to customize specialized web offers. But open challenges are valuable not only for their pure results, but for the discussions between contestants. The solution to a problem might not be one proposal, but may lie in the combination of two or more. Pure online challenges are easily scalable and can attract large crowds. On the flip side, it can be challenging to spur productive debates between contestants.
To recognize the potential of combining their ideas and to stay in touch as part of a new innovative community, participants need to know and trust each other. Trust is created when teams need to shell out ideas and concepts under tight deadlines. When they sweat together in confined spaces and afterwards have beers together. That’s why actual meetings, for just an afternoon or an entire weekend, are an important element of open challenges.
During hackdays, nerds rip apart data and hardware. What would it take for this espresso machine be one day part of an energy-intelligent kitchen? Lets look inside. Hackdays bring people together around a common challenge.
From a company perspective, open innovation ideally creates a community of committed experts and customers who can for instance provide input into product development and testing. A recent Energy Hackday in Berlin was jointly organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Stromnetz Berlin, a power grid operator owned by Swedish utility Vattenfall. Its German operations have long had to endure criticism from environmental groups over its use of brown coal and nuclear power. Earlier this year, a popular petition to return Berlin’s local power grip to state ownership failed only by a small margin. The challenge of the Energy Hackday was to develop apps that make household power consumption more transparent, giving households more say in how and when they’re using electricity. Real, face-to-face events that are part of open challenges can help corporations to open up and engage with communities it might not have been in touch with so far.
Online and offline go hand in hand. German university TU Berlin is currently running the Open Innovation Slam that focuses on producing data on power consumption habits as well. Contestants registered their ideas on an online platform during the first phase of the competition. They provided each other with feedback and could attract new team members. The ten winners were then invited to spend a weekend with expert support and external speakers.
