The Open 100 Competition

We are pleased to announce 'The Open 100' competition which is a celebration of the power and value of openness and mass collaboration.

You can be part of the competition by nominating the company you think is the best open innovator. The competition will be open until 12th February while the winners will be announced on 24th February 2010, at a conference in London called Open for Business. With the help of our judges the Open 100 will be created out of the best 20 companies from each of the 5 categories:

1. Open Innovation – This involves companies sourcing or placing innovations externally towards a mutual benefit. This promises higher quality, faster and cheaper innovation.
2. Crowdsourcing – Usually on the web as the benefit of leveraging both the diversity and wisdom of the crowd for new ideas, products and partners.
3. Co-creation – This takes elements from crowdsourcing in valuing the wisdom of the crowd and yet also esteems the expertise of professionals, in a hybrid model.
4. Open Source Software – This is both about wide spread collaboration and opening up intellectual property via the creative use licensing strategies.
5. Open Business – Open business tend to open up their business process and models that often involve giving away a product or service for free, sharing it with a community and making revenue model around this.

The reason we are doing this is to spark a debate around the value of openness in business (and other organisations), to bring some clarity to the many terms and phrases that are used in this space, and to recognise and raise the profile of those who do it really well, be they large multinational companies or small and/or distributed organisations.

*Note: this competition is based on a previous post and an entirely open wiki that we created a few months ago that had lots of contributors. You can view the original list here.