Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning

Open innovation, taken from the fields of business strategy and technology development, can offer planners fresh insights into their own practice. Open innovation, like citizen participation, goes outside the boundaries of the organization to find solutions to problems and to hand ideas off to partners. A key technique for open innovation is "crowdsourcing," issuing a challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization. The differences between citizen participation and Internet-based crowdsourcing are discussed. Crowdsourcing case studies are provided as a means for extending an emerging literature.