Using Open Innovation to Identify the Best Ideas

To reap the benefits of open innovation, managers must understand what to open, how to open it and how to manage the resulting problems.

BY ANDREW KING AND KARIM R. LAKHANI

As innovation becomes more democratic, many of the best ideas for new products and services no longer originate in well-financed corporate and government laboratories. Instead, they come from almost anywhere and anyone.¹ How can companies tap into this distributed knowledge and these diverse skills? Increasingly, organizations are considering using an open-innovation process, but many are finding that making open innovation work can be more complicated than it looks. PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, for example, created ...