More and more companies are shopping outside their organizations for innovation, whether it’s raw ideas or market-ready businesses. Here’s how to choose what’s best for you from among the array of offerings.

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Blogs have the grassroots credibility to influence what people think, do, and buy.

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In the networked world, firms are recognizing the power of the Internet as a platform for co-creating value with customers. We focus on how the Internet has impacted the process of collaborative innovation - a key process in value co-creation. We outline the distinctive capabilities of the Internet as a platform for customer engagement, including interactivity, enhanced reach, persistence, speed, and flexibility, and suggest that firms can use these capabilities to engage customers in collaborative product innovation through a variety of Internet-based mechanisms.

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In this book, we review the emerging organizational forms that support distributed innovation and propose a taxonomy of organizational forms that range from community-centric to firm-centric mechanisms, and organic versus structured mechanisms. We emphasize the development of community-centric innovation and "open innovation" approaches.

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Examine the implications of virtual customer environments for supporting the innovation process. By building on the literature of knowledge brokers, Kellogg experts introduce the concept of virtual knowledge brokers—actors who leverage the internet to support third parties’ innovation activities. These actors enable firms to extend their reach in engaging with customers and they also allow firms to have a richer dialogue with customers because of their perceived neutrality. Consequently, virtual knowledge brokers help firms to complement the knowledge they can acquire through traditional physical and virtual channels for customer interaction.

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