INNO1003 Collaboration, Co-Creation & The Crowd: Leveraging your Ecosystem for Innovation

Unbridled advances in technology and connectedness have transformed the relationship between companies, customers, and competitors. With this transformation, the lines between business relationships, social connections, and competitive advantage are converging and becoming increasingly intertwined. At the same time, there is a growing urgency to collaborate across boundaries to co-create solutions to the world's increasingly complex, "wicked" problems. As a result, companies across all industries and size classes-from established industry giants to high-growth companies in new technology areas-require the skills and knowledge to strategically harness the power of "the crowd" for collaborative and open innovation.

This highly experiential and challenge-led topic is designed to help students: understand how open innovation is used to create competitive advantage, improve society, and disrupt markets; develop the analytical ability to assess ambiguous, unstructured problems and provide solutions; apply practical tools for open innovation, crowdsourcing, collaboration and co-creation and crowdfunding and create new value by developing and implementing co-innovation initiatives.

This topic aims to help students develop the knowledge and capabilities needed to navigate and create opportunities from the evolving and intertwined nature of technology and industry convergence, digitally connected users and markets and open and disruptive innovation.

This topic is highly experiential in nature and integrates cutting edge practice and scholarship to develop students' insights and capabilities across: the challenges and opportunities of open innovation and co-creation; the crowdsourcing of innovation in established firms and new entrants; the use of technological connectedness and social media strategies in developing innovative user communities and the emergence of crowd-based funding as a financial tool for launching new projects. Students directly apply concepts from the topic in project and team based exercises, thus building an analytic and conceptual toolset to leverage dynamic opportunities and changes in startups and existing companies that come from digital disruption, connectedness and convergence.

1. Understand the difference between closed, open and co-innovation approaches and the challenges and opportunities associated with each, particularly in the context of creating new value
2. Describe how open innovation, crowdsourcing, and co-creation are used to create competitive advantage, improve society and disrupt markets
3. Explain how different types of organisations - i.e. established firms, governments, NGOs, and startups - implement open innovation strategies to create value
4. Identify problems, opportunities and/or solutions that could be addressed and enhanced by open and/or co-innovation approaches
5. Plan and develop an open/co-innovation project, leveraging the ecosystem or "crowd"
6. Identify and explore user needs, problems, opportunities
7. Source, recommend and critique solutions, features and benefits
8. Research, test and validate proposed solutions
9. Crowdfund prototypes and launch
10. Build a user community of early adopters and champions