Companies today need to think in open innovation, involving the creative potential of the crowd and tap into this diversity to enable breakthrough. 5 key elements success keys to open innovation management:

1. Active user involvement: people are more motivated to be part of innovation when the change will affect them personally. Their participation provides a sense of autonomy and influence to direct change, rather than being victims of it;
2. Real-life setting and testing: people want to be part of a winning idea, but not all ideas are good enough to be successful. Innovation games bring a healthy and collaborative balance to competition to select the best ideas with team spirit to develop them. The team will join forces to develop the most promising ideas, test it and correct it until necessary.
3. Multi-stakeholder participation: the involvement of service and technology providers, developers, decision makers and end users ensures a complex approach and bigger usefulness.
4. Multi-method approach: multiple approach and point of views bring a lot of useful input into the process (e.g. multidisciplinary or inter-departments approach).
5. Co-creation: it is beneficial to promote stakeholders’ joint involvement at the different stages of development cycle.

http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/FAQ