The Meteorological Enterprise and Open Innovation: Waking up to the Potential of Crowdsourcing

The Meteorological Enterprise and Open Innovation: Waking up to the Power of Crowdsourcing

Innovation is defined as a process that produces a novel product, process, or service that has value. The emphasis on value is what distinguishes innovation from invention – which is a novel idea that has not yet been usefully employed. Open Innovation is one means of innovation and refers to the solicitation and use by organisations of internal and external sources of knowledge – and internal and external paths to market - to advance a firms technologies. Simply put, Open Innovation either brings innovation from outside an organisation or provides innovation to markets outside the firm’s normal customer domain.  

One of the most promising techniques of open innovation is crowdsourcing which is defined as an online, distributed, production and problem-solving model. Crowdsourcing relies on the external capacities of the global crowd to provide such resources as data, knowledge, computational power, funding, distributed journalism, and reward-based R&D challenges.

While crowdsourcing has existed in principle for centuries, it is enjoying a renaissance over the last two decades as a result of the advent of the internet. This is particularly true of private firms and a few government agencies around the world which have instituted formal mechanisms and various tools and techniques for the adoption of crowdsourcing  - with extraordinary results.

However, few meteorological enterprises are aware of the potential value of crowdsourcing and the imperative for adopting open innovation management systems.  

This presentation will provide an overview of open innovation and crowdsourcing with an emphasis on reward-based R&D challenges and will discuss related efforts by Canada’s Meteorological Service of Canada.