Radical crowd based open innovation and design for sustainability

Collaborative “crowd” based open innovation and design as well as funding activities, websites, platforms and projects are becoming increasingly popular. These combine the creativity of people with new enabling technologies like online platforms, rapid prototyping machines, simple Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to design and produce individualised products and services. However, very often these methods and tools are used to produce fun but unsustainable "stuff". How these new Internet and crowd based methods and tools can be used to create technological and social innovation and design that actually leads to more sustainable life styles has been explored and is demonstrated by the Sustainability Maker project, www.sustainabilitymaker.org, and its open innovation for sustainability platform www.innonatives.com, partly funded by the European Life+ Environment programme. The platform innonatives.com connects actors that have identified and/or suffer from sustainability related problems with actors who have found or would like to contribute to generating solutions for such problems. The platform systematically enables the creation of very divers open sustainability innovation and design solutions through crowd- sourcing, crowd-voting, crowd-testing, and helps to implement them through crowd-funding, an online marketplace for sustainable solutions, an expert system, and educational activities. Success and failure factors, other research findings, as well as the quality and type of solutions that can be generated by crowd based open innovation for sustainability platforms are discussed in this paper.