The Launch of OpenIDEO

Intro­duc­tion to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

This week, IDEO launched an open idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form called OpenIDEO. It is a place where any­one, not just design­ers, can con­tribute ideas, become inspired and eval­u­ate the ideas of oth­ers. The thing I like most about OpenIDEO is the fact that it uses col­lab­o­ra­tion to solve impor­tant social prob­lems. You can see oth­er people’s ideas and build on them. It isn’t the type of web­site where a com­pa­ny that is too cheap to hire a design­er can crowd­source their logo design for a $50 prize. OpenIDEO push­es the idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form to the next lev­el.

Tim Brown pret­ty much sums up my thoughts on this, but he explains it bet­ter than I ever could:

The idea of crowd­sourc­ing inno­va­tion is, in my view, still a big exper­i­ment. Con­ven­tion­al­ly the ques­tion has been whether the crowd can out­per­form the inter­nal team. Our view is that small teams are good for some things and the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty is good for oth­ers. The goal of OpenIDEO is to find out whether it is pos­si­ble to orches­trate a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the two to achieve bet­ter results. We are start­ing the exper­i­ment now and we hope you will join us.
- Tim Brown of IDEO

There are two chal­lenges cur­rent­ly open on the site. The first chal­lenge is to help Jamie Oliv­er in his effort to inspire and edu­cate kids about healthy eat­ing habits. The sec­ond chal­lenge is for Gray Mat­ters Cap­i­tal and involves fos­ter­ing edu­ca­tion­al tools for the devel­op­ing world.I’m excit­ed about this site and I am anx­ious to see how it evolves!