An embarrassment of riches

Abstract

Open innovation systems have provided organizations, ranging from businesses and governments to universities and NGOs, with unprecedented access to the "wisdom of the crowd", allowing them to collect candidate solutions, for problems they care about, from potentially thousands of individuals, at very low cost. These systems, however, face important open challenges deriving, ironically, from their very success: they can elicit such huge levels of participation that it becomes very difficult to guide the crowd in productive ways, and pick out the best of what they have created. This viewpoint article reviews the key challenges facing open innovation systems and issues a call-to-arms describing how the research community can move forward on this important topic.