Participatory marketing taken to the next level

The July issue of the Mckinsey Quarterly has an interesting article called “the next step in open innovation.” The article is a discussion of how the examples of customer creation  of Wikipedia and Linux can be applied more broadly to most business. [Eric von Hippel has advocated user innovation since the mid-70s, and he and others have criticized the open innovation advocates for under-emphasizing the most useful co-creators, the users of the services and goods.]

The article claims that we are in the early stages of “distributed co-creation” and suggests important issues that need to be addressed such as:

1. Attracting and motivating co-creators
2. IP ownership
3. Structuring problems
4. Governance to facilitate co-creation

The full article is available at the McKinsey site:

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Information_Technology/Networking/next_step_in_open_innovation_2155_abstract