Afterword

We have introduced concepts both simple and complex. Sometimes building upon old ideas, we have also presented new frameworks and approaches intended to be both practical and implementable in most businesses. Our sincere goal is that you can literally transform the way you innovate and manage your business through the use of the ideas discussed in this book. As high a goal as we have attempted to hit with this book, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience for us as the authors. And we hope you derive as much from reading these chapters as we did writing them.

Family, friends, colleagues, and reviewers have all provided terrific feedback these past months, which has added immeasurably to the quality of the book and its readability. Interestingly, there were a few areas of recurring feedback that we could not address sufficiently in the book. First was the desire to tell InnoCentive’s story from its founding to the present—and forward, to what might come next. Indeed the story is like no other and is one that we love to tell. The second area involves delving deeply into our learnings over the years in understanding the mechanics of inducements, prizes, and other incentives in organizing work effectively and enabling collaborative innovation on increasingly large scales—in essence, the behavioral psychology of crowdsourcing from InnoCentive’s unique vantage point. The final area was the call for many more case studies telling the amazing stories of InnoCentive’s solvers and their ingenuity and dedication in finding solutions to problems.

Now as we said in the introduction, this book was written to educate, tool, and even inspire leaders to embark on a journey to transform their organizations. Unfortunately, the richness of that topic meant that we used InnoCentive examples only where required to make the points needed in the book. In other words, our targeted readers required only minimal treatment of those topics, allowing us to focus more broadly on new innovation frameworks, the multiplicity of innovation channels, management issues, methodology, culture, and so forth.

That said, there is no doubt that we are at the center of a hotbed of activity that is shattering all the prior notions of how innovation happens, how organizations should access and manage talent, and why people do what they do. We observe and facilitate unbelievably inspiring stories of the power of crowds to do everything from accelerating industrial research, to imagining new business opportunities, to accelerating cures for neglected diseases. We agree. These stories may well be the basis of the next book. So stay tuned!