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This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons learned.

This paper defines four phases of implementing an open innovation program: Learn, Pilot, Scale and Sustain. It provides guidance on the time required for each phase and recommendations for how to utilize a CoE to succeed. Recommendations are based upon the experience of NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate, and experience at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard running hundreds of challenges with research and development organizations.

Lessons learned include the importance of grounding innovation initiatives in the business strategy, assessing the portfolio of work to select problems most amenable to solving via crowdsourcing methodology, framing problems that external parties can solve, thinking strategically about early wins, selecting the right platforms, developing criteria for evaluation, and advancing a culture of innovation. Establishing a CoE provides an effective infrastructure to address both technical and cultural issues.

The NASA experience spanned more than seven years from initial learnings about open innovation concepts to the successful scaling and sustaining of an open innovation program; this paper provides recommendations on how to decrease this timeline to three years.

The concept of a community form is drawn upon in many subfields of organizational theory. Although there is not much convergence on a level of analysis, there is convergence on a mode of action that is increasingly relevant to a knowledge-based economy marked by porous and shifting organizational boundaries. We argue that communities play an underappreciated role in organizational theory – critical not only to occupational identity, knowledge transfer, sense-making, social support, innovation, problem-solving, and collective action but also, enabled by information technology, increasingly providing socioeconomic value – in areas once inhabited by organizations alone. Hence, we posit that organizations may be in the shadow of communities. Rather than push for a common definition, we link communities to an organization's evolution: its birth, growth, and death. We show that communities represent both opportunities and threats to organizations and conclude with a research agenda that more fully accounts for the potential of community forms to be a creator (and a possible destroyer) of value for organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In the early eighteenth century, an English carpenter and clock maker, John Harrison, was awarded a phenomenal sum of money – £15,000 – when he made a great scientific and technological breakthrough. Harrison invented the marine chronometer which determined ships' longitude at sea. The Longitude Prize was established after the likes of Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton had failed to come up with a solution. Recalling the story in the Harvard Business Review, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhari make the point that this is really an early example of what we now call crowdsourcing – getting ideas or creating new products and services by enlisting the help of a large body of people.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

Under certain conditions, a mass of people can be smarter than the best expert – even if the expert is part of the group. In this paper we show how leaders can improve decision making by tapping into the collective intelligence of their organization.

Based on James Surowiecki’s four conditions of collective intelligence (cognitive diversity, independence, utilization of decentralized knowledge, and effective aggregation of dispersed knowledge), we discuss how leaders can tap into the wisdom of the crowd of their organizations.

We show how leaders can increase cognitive diversity in decision making, access decentralized knowledge in their organizations, encourage individuals to contribute their knowledge without interference from peer pressure, conformity or influence from superiors, and how knowledge can effectively be aggregated to make wiser decisions.

While various tools exist to reap the collective intelligence of a group, we argue that leaders also must change their attitudes and leadership styles. Using evidence from various studies and several examples we show what leaders can do to make smarter decisions.