#3 Collaborative Social Innovation: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement

We are delighted to share that we will be
publishing the People’s Insights Annual
Report titled “Now & Next: Future of
Engagement” in January 2013 as an interactive
iPad app. The report will highlight the ten
most important frontiers that will define
the future of engagement for marketers,
entrepreneurs and changemakers:
Crowdfunding, Transmedia Storytelling,
Social Curation, Behavior Change Games,
Grassroots Change Movements, Collaborative
Social Innovation, Crowdsourced Product
Innovation, Collective Intelligence, Social
Recommendation and Hybrid Reality
Experiences.
Throughout 2012, 100+ planners on
MSLGROUP’s Insights Network have been
tracking inspiring web platforms and brand
programs at the intersection of social data,
citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling.
Every week, we pick up one project and
curate the conversations around it — on the
MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also
on the broader social web — into a weekly
insights report. Every quarter, we compile
these insights, along with original research
and insights from the MSLGROUP global
network, into the People’s Insights Quarterly
Magazine. Now, we have synthesized the
insights from our year-long endeavor in future
scanning as foresights into the future of
engagement.
We believe, like William Gibson that, “the
future is already here; it’s just not very evenly
distributed.” So, innovative web platforms
in the areas of social data, citizenship,
crowdsourcing and storytelling point towards
interesting possibilities for brand programs
that leverage similar models to engage
people. In turn, the web platforms and brand
programs of today give us clues to the future
of engagement tomorrow.
In our reports on the ten frontiers that will
define the future of engagement, we start by
describing why they are important, how they
work, and how brands might benefit from
them; we then examine web platforms and
brand programs that point to the future
(that is already here); then finish by identifying
some of the most important features of that
future, with our recommendations on how to
benefit from them.
For the next ten weeks, we will publish
these reports one by one, then present them
together, in context, as an interactive iPad app.
Do subscribe to our email newsletter to receive
each report and also an invite to download a
free copy of the interactive iPad app.
People’s Insights Annual Report

3
What is Collaborative Social
Innovation?
Source: thinkpublic on Flickr
Organizations and people
co-design innovative and
sustainable solutions to
create shared value.
Click to watch: OpenIDEO by IDEO
Collaborative social innovation initiatives involve
businesses, governments, non-profits and
changemakers coming together to co-create
innovative and sustainable solutions around a
shared purpose. Such initiatives typically focus
on the areas that have the highest potential to
create shared value: environment, energy and
sustainability; health, wellness and nutrition;
education, learning and capability building; and
governance, public services and public spaces.
Changemakers are typically rewarded with
prize money, recognition, funding or support;
organizations find solutions to important
challenges; and society at large benefits from
the innovative solutions.
The rise of collaborative social innovation can be
attributed to three broad trends. First, businesses,
governments and non-profits are realizing the
importance of multi-stakeholder social innovation
solutions that create shared value, especially
in the context of engaging Gen Ys. Second,
organizations like the XPrize Foundation (video),
which have a long history of creating “large-scale,
high-profile, incentivized prize competitions” to
solve problems that are important for society, are
learning how to reach new groups of innovators
from across the world, thanks to the internet.
Third, networks like TED, PopTech, Echoing
Green (video), Ashoka (video) and StartingBloc
(video) are connecting young changemakers and
showcasing their work, through conferences,
challenges and fellowships, inspiring others to
follow in their footsteps.
As a result, we are seeing a number of platforms
focusing on different aspects of collaborative
social innovation.
Open IDEO (video) by design and innovation
consultancy IDEO has partnered with businesses,
governments, and non-profits to create a series
of collaborative social innovation challenges.
ChallengePost, MindMixer (video), Ashoka
Change makers (video) and One Billion Minds
(video) are other third-party collaborative
social innovation platforms which enable
organizations to create challenges for the public.
ChallengePost focuses on open government
challenges and MindMixer encourages civic
engagement, while Ashoka Change makers and
One Billion Minds feature a wide range of social
innovation challenges. Other platforms, like
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence’s Climate
CoLab project, are focused on a single topic, like
climate change.

Click to watch: Ashoka Change makers
Source: grafixer on Flickr
How does Collaborative Social
Innovation work?
Open government is another important area
for collaborative social innovation. In the US,
Challenge.gov, which is built on Challenge
Post, has created a series of open government
challenges for federal, state and local agencies,
while Data.gov encourages developers to build
applications using its public data sets and
showcases the best applications. In parallel,
organizations like Sunlight Foundation (video)
and Code for America (video) are helping create
the ecosystem to enable collaborative social
innovation. In the UK, SparkCentral is a government
collaborative social innovation platform that
aims to “build partnerships across the public,
private and voluntary sectors to deliver more for
less.” In Finland, Open Ministry is a legislation
crowdsourcing platform that enables Finnish
citizens to propose new laws to the parliament.
Some of these collaborative social innovation
platforms have had significant impact. For
instance, Ashoka Change makers has channeled
$600 million in funding to more than 10,000
social innovators, through more than 50
challenges, with the help of more than 500,000
community members.
The success of collaborative social innovation
initiatives shows that organizations and people
are capable of co-creating innovative solutions to
complex problems, and has created a new model
Collaborative social innovation platforms are
typically a hybrid of three models: innovation
challenges, innovation ecosystems, and open
data platforms.
Most online collaborative social innovation
initiatives follow a contest model in which an
organization posts a challenge on a platform
and invites individuals, groups of individuals or
other organizations to submit innovations. These
innovations can be at any stage of completion,
ranging from ideas or sketches to full-blown
business proposals to products, services or
technologies that already exist at a smaller scale.
Some platforms include a structured design
thinking approach with inspiration, concepting,
evaluation and collaboration phases (OpenIDEO
(video)), while others break up the challenge
into what, where and who elements (Climate
CoLab). Some platforms match community
members with challenges based on interest
(ChallengePost) while other motivate community
members by using game mechanics like a design
quotient score (OpenIDEO).
for changemakers to showcase their innovations,
for governments and foundations to find
solutions to societal issues and for businesses to
realize sustainable growth.
Like MIT’s Thomas W. Malone says:
“We want to create more intelligent
organizations, more intelligent businesses,
more intelligent governments, more intelligent
societies. As all the people and computers on our
planet get more and more closely connected, it’s
becoming increasingly useful to think of all the
people and computers on the planet as a kind of
global brain.”

5
Click to watch: GE Ecomagination Challenge
Other social innovation challenges don’t have
a direct impact on the company’s business,
but do strengthen the company’s reputation
by strengthening its association with social
innovation. In many such initiatives, companies
partner with educational institutions or non-profit
organizations and target students and young
innovators. Dell Social Innovation Challenge
(video), HP Social Innovation Relay (video), Citi
Innovation Challenge (video), Sony Open Planet
Ideas (video#!), Toyota Ideas for Good (video),
Samsung Solve for Tomorrow (video),
Intel Innovators (video),Sygenta Thought
for Food Challenge (video, McKinsey Social
Innovation Video Contest (video) and Dell Go
Green Challenge (on MSLGROUP’s People’s Lab
crowdsourcing platform) are good examples.
Some companies commit to long-term social
innovation challenge platforms, with the
intention of creating an ecosystem to connect
changemakers and build capabilities. For
Innovations are judged either quantitatively
according to a set of scoring criteria or
qualitatively by a panel of judges typically made
up of experts, specialists and members of the
funding committee. In some cases, community
members must vote on ideas to increase their
chances of appearing before the judges. Winning
innovators are rewarded with either cash prizes
(ChallengePost, Ashoka Change makers (video))
or with recognition and satisfaction that they have
helped contribute to social good (OpenIDEO,
Open Ministry).
Some of these innovation challenge platforms
are designed primarily as destination
communities (OpenIDEO, One Billion Minds
(video)), while others offer white label options
to enable organizations to create their own
standalone challenge platforms (ChallengePost,
MindMixer (video)).
For some platforms, like Ashoka Change makers,
the innovation challenges are a small part of the
overall innovation ecosystem, which includes
community, capability building and funding.
For other platforms, like Data.gov, the innovation
challenges serve the purpose of connecting
government agencies who can share public data
with changemakers and developers who can
build applications on top of this data to improve
how these agencies deliver public services.
In essence, all collaborative social innovation
platforms are designed around four dynamics:
connect, catalyze, crystallize, and celebrate.
First, platforms need to connect stakeholders
so that they have a context to engage with the
organization and with each other. Then, platforms
need to catalyze interactions so that new ideas
and projects can emerge organically. Next,
platforms need to synthesize these ideas into
solutions that benefit from and build upon the
best ideas. Finally, platforms need to celebrate
the most powerful or popular ideas, actions and
stories by highlighting them.
Collaborative Social Innovation for Brands
Just like third-party collaborative social
innovation platforms, branded collaborative
social innovation platforms are typically a
hybrid of three models: innovation challenges,
innovation ecosystems, and open data platforms.
The most popular model for brands is innovation
challenges, or contests to crowdsource social
innovation solutions. Several brands have
launched social innovation challenges, both
as part of their citizenship strategy, to fund,
inspire and connect social innovators (Mahindra
Spark the Rise (video), Dell Social Innovation
Challenge (video)) and also as part of their
business strategy, to co-create innovative and
sustainable solutions that create shared value
(GE Ecomagination Challenge (video), GE
Healthymagination Challenge (video)).
Social innovation challenges that are part of a
company’s business strategy usually benefit
the change-maker or innovator, the business
itself and society at large. In such programs, the
brand is usually looking to invest in or acquire the
innovation, or promote it by supporting it with its
business scale. For instance, since the launch
of the GE Ecomagination Challenge (video) to
find innovations in energy and sustainability, GE
has committed $134 million to 22 investments
and commercial partnerships, granted $1.1
million in seed funding to early stage companies
and entrepreneurs, and acquired one of the
businesses that entered the challenge.

Collaborative Social Innovation Case
Studies
Throughout the year, we have tracked the
conversations around a number of collaborative
social innovation platforms and branded
programs in our weekly insights reports and
quarterly magazines; here are a few highlights.
Web platform: Open Ministry
Source: avoinministerio.fi
In March 2012, the Finland Citizens’ Initiative
Act went into effect, giving citizens the right to
propose legislation to the Finnish Parliament,
provided 50,000 citizens of voting age support
the idea within six months. To facilitate this, a
group of non-profit entrepreneurs launched web
platform Open Ministry through which citizens
can propose and vote on new legislature online.
Several banks and telecom providers have
supported this platform by providing free access
to their verification APIs.
Journalist Susan Fourtané welcomed the move:
“Today, companies are crowdsourcing
everything from designs of cars to marketing
slogans. Why shouldn’t governments follow
suit?”
Indeed, people too are interested in collaborating
over legislature. Joonas Pekkanen, founder of
Open Ministry, wrote:
“Citizens have begun to call for a more open,
transparent and participatory western democracy
in place of the old rigid system.”
instance, both Mahindra Spark the Rise (video)
and Pepsi Refresh Project (video) ran for two
years and created significant impact. We have
covered both these initiatives in our
Future of Engagement report on Crowdfunding
as examples of crowdfunding programs focused
on creators.
Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing
Director of Mahindra Group, talked about the role
of such initiatives:
“The way companies build brands has evolved.
In version 2.0, we saw companies come in with
a larger purpose and meaning, beyond the
business. Now, we are trying to build a 21st
century corporation, by energizing people and
giving them a core purpose to be part of.”
Some of these social innovation ecosystems
take the shape of public-private partnerships
that bring together stakeholders from business,
government, academia and civil society to
institutionalize social innovation. For instance,
Walmart has created 14 Sustainable Value
Networks since 2005 to bring together diverse
stakeholders to develop solutions to fulfill
Walmart’s commitment towards renewable
energy, zero waste and sustainable products. IBM
launched the Smarter Cities Challenge (video) to
collaborate with local governments and co-fund
technology-based solutions to city-specific urban
challenges. HP launched the Catalyst Initiative
(video) to collaborate with educators in finding
innovative solutions to enhance student literacy
in STEM subjects.
In other collaborative social innovation
initiatives, companies create open networks
to share intellectual property and know-
how, and encourage stakeholders to build
upon it. As an example, to realize its vision of
sustainable “considered design”, Nike created
the GreenXchange (video) in 2009 as an open
platform for companies and people to share
green intellectual property, processes and ideas.
Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell, sums
up the opportunity this positive multi-stakeholder
approach opens up for all of us:
“The new engine of innovation driven by
collaboration, openness, stewardship and
the power of the social web gives all of us an
opportunity to drive even more rapid,
meaningful change across global institutions.”

7
Click to watch: Intel Innovators
In early 2012, Intel gave $300,000 to youth
innovators who presented ideas on how they
would change the world through technology, as
part of the Intel Innovators contest.
The contest helped youth innovators gain
attention not only from the industry, but also
from their close and extended networks. Pascal
Wagner, a participant in the contest, reflected on
how the experience led him to reach out to his
extended network for support and become more
vocal about his project:
“While walking around my college campus,
I had over 20 different people stop me asking me
about Wordio and the competition – most of
them had not known that I was working on this
project for the last four months.”
A unique aspect of Intel Innovators is the use
of gamification to involve people who weren’t
participating directly in the contest. Rooshabh
Doshi, member of the MSLGROUP’s Insights
Network, noted:
“Making fans who invest the most amount of
social capital on participants, ‘Top Fans’ and
allowing them to be a part of ‘The Battleground’
to award an idea $50,000, gives them an
immense feeling of belonging at the end of the
day… It’s a win-win for fans as well as
participants at the end of the day.”
Intel Innovators was a part of Intel “Innovators
of Tomorrow” branding campaign and
demonstrated the commitment of the
company to fostering innovation among young
entrepreneurs. Noah Kerner, CEO of Noise, the
agency behind the campaign, said:
“[Start ups] can raise money from funds like
GE’s 200MM Ecoimagination Challenge or
programs like Intel Innovators, which we created
in part to give young entrepreneurs access to
funding that they might not otherwise have. In
the future, there will be an increasing number of
opportunities like this so young entrepreneurs
can get more creative about how they raise
money and smarter about how much equity
they give up.”
David Meyer, a writer at GigaOm.com, attributed
the success of the initiative to Finland’s culture of
openness and history of collaboration between
citizens and the government, and noted the
global significance of the Open Ministry project:
“Nordic countries tend to have relatively close
societies where people are enthusiastic about
pitching into civic life… Tech-driven democracy
fans in other countries may not find the
environment as conducive to crowdsourced
legislation right now, but on the other hand they
just got themselves a model to study.”
In October 2012, the first citizen-proposed law, a
ban on fur farming, entered Parliament with the
support of 55,000 citizens.
Branded program: Intel Innovators
Read the full case study on our blog or on
Slideshare

Source: dellchallenge.org
Source: sparktherise.com
Click to watch: Dell Social Innovation Challenge
Since 2007, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge
has inspired 15,000 students from 105 countries
to share 4,500 proposals to tackle the world’s
problems and has empowered them with access
to peers, mentors and faculty members and
$450,000 in funding. Dell has also committed
to investing a further $5 million to engage more
students every year.
The Dell Social Innovation Challenge has acted
as an incubator for several promising start ups,
and has helped entrepreneurs boost their skills,
networks and marketability. Katherine Bascom,
who was part of the 2010 winning team
Shining Hope for Communities, said:
“Since we’ve won [the challenge], we’ve raised
$1.2 million from funders like Echo in Green,
Newman’s Own Foundation and several other
small family foundations. We’ve been featured
in New York Times, Vogue Magazine and Fast
Company and other media outlets.”
Suzi Sosa, a Dell employee and contributor to
Forbes BrandVoice highlighted the importance
and rise of ‘systems innovations’, a trend
emerging in the social entrepreneurship industry
as well as in the Dell Social Innovation Challenge:
“Though not always as simple or sexy as
product innovations, systems innovations are
critical for our planet. The world’s most urgent
problems remain unsolved because they are tied
to broken systems that no single product can
remedy.”
“The winners of this year’s Dell Social Innovation
Challenge created two systems innovations
that not only have the potential to impact the
lives of millions, but also reflect an important
and exciting trend for social entrepreneurship
worldwide.”
The Dell Social Innovation Challenge community
has 230,000 members. Nearly 500 employees
have participated in challenge as mentors or
judges.
Branded program: Mahindra Spark the
Rise
Slideshare
Branded program: Dell Social Innovation
Challenge
Slideshare

9
Click to watch: Mahindra Spark the Rise
are focused on social innovation and civic
engagement.
Mature organizations will need to go beyond
platforms and commit to long-term public-
private partnerships that create strong multi-
stakeholder ecosystems to scale both the
engagement in such initiatives and the impact of
the innovations that result from them
(Dell Social Innovation Challenge (video), IBM
Smarter Cities Solutions).
Specifically, we expect educational institutions to
become more proactive in both partnering with
other organizations to co-create collaborative
social innovation initiatives targeted at students,
and find innovative ways to bring such initiatives
into the classroom (OpenIDEO University Toolkit,
Samsung Solve for Tomorrow (video)).
Even as more corporations create branding-
driven collaborative social innovation challenges,
we expect more Fortune 500 firms to follow
GE’s example and create challenges which have
a direct business impact, by investing in the
winning innovations, or using their business clout
to scale them.
As open government data and application
programming interfaces (APIs) become that
norm, we expect many more governments
to open up civic data and invite developers
to build applications on top of them. We also
expect some non-profits and corporations to
experiment with this model and share data or
intellectual property in an open network so that
third party developers can build social innovation
applications on them.
In a TED Talk, former U.S. Deputy Chief
Technology Officer Beth Noveck said:
“If we want to see the hopeful, exciting kinds
of innovations in clean energy and education and
development, if we want to see those adopted
and scaled, we must all participate. Open up
institutions and let the nutrients flow throughout
our culture to create open institutions, a
stronger democracy, a better tomorrow.”
Finally, as organizations become better at
designing and measuring collaborative social
innovation initiatives, we will see them investing
heavily to replicate pilot innovations across
markets and scale their impact
(Walmart Sustainable Value Networks).
In 2012 and 2013, Mahindra Group is giving grants
of $1 million to 96 ideas and projects that can
drive positive change in India under its Spark the
Rise program. Mahindra also connects change
makers with each other and mentors, to help
create an ecosystem for social innovation
in India.
The program is a demonstration of Mahindra
Group’s commitment to its corporate philosophy
‘Rise.’ Ad veteran Ramesh Narayan commented:
“Mahindra is making a statement it is
committed to helping India, and backing it with
action. [Spark the Rise] is an eloquent statement
of its positioning, unlike a mere advertising
campaign that says the company is committed
to some cause or the other.”
Former ad-man Lakshmipathy Bhat noted the
need for companies to embrace purpose-driven
campaigns like Spark the Rise:
“Consumers are a lot more wary of advertising
claims. They also have access to information on
the internet which allow them to form a considered
opinion about a brand and not just depend on
what the advertising says. So in a way, companies
can be ‘caught out’ if they were to merely pay lip
service to a claim… In this context, the Mahindra
Group initiative, Rise is commendable.”
The Future of Collaborative Social
Innovation
In the near future, we expect collaborative
social innovation to become the norm both for
corporations creating innovations that create
shared value and governments and changemakers
designing solutions for social good.
Even as white label open innovation platforms
like BrightIdea and People’s Lab mature,
we will see more specialized platforms like
ChallengePost and MindMixer (video), which

Learn more about us at:
peopleslab.mslgroup.com | twitter.com/peopleslab
People’s Lab is MSLGROUP’s proprietary
crowdsourcing platform and approach that
helps organizations tap into people’s insights for
innovation, storytelling and change.
The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform
helps organizations build and nurture public
or private, web or mobile, hosted or white
label communities around four pre-configured
application areas: Expertise Request Network,
Innovation Challenge Network, Research &
Insights Network and Contest & Activation
Network. Our community and gaming features
encourage people to share rich content, vote/
comment on other people’s content and
collaborate to find innovative solutions.
The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform
and approach forms the core of our distinctive
insights and foresight approach, which consists
of four elements: organic conversation analysis,
MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-
specific insights communities, and ethnographic
deep dives into these communities. The People’s
Insights Quarterly Magazines showcase our
capability in crowdsourcing and analyzing
insights from conversations and communities.
People’s Lab:
Crowdsourcing
Innovation & Insights

Write to us to start a conversation on the future of engagement.:
Pascal Beucler,
SVP & Chief Strategy Officer
(pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com)
Janelle Dixon,
North America Head of Insights
(janelle.dixon@mslgroup.com)
Dominic Payling,
Europe Head of Insights
(dominic.payling@mslgroup.com)
Gaurav Mishra,
Asia Head of Insights
(gaurav.mishra@mslgroup.com)
mslgroup.com | twitter.com/msl_group
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into the equation, MSLGROUP's reach
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Today the largest 'PR and Engagement'
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#3 Collaborative Social Innovation: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement

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#3 Collaborative Social Innovation: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement