A recent NY Times article, “The Invention Mob,” highlights recent trends toward “community-based innovation” or “collaborative crowdsourcing” as both a business model and an alternative approach to conventional, corporate, and costly in-house R&D for invention and innovation.  As the article notes, such an approach is not a silver bullet and “clever invention does not equal market demand.” Still, it does significantly speed up the process and thereby reduce the cost of failure and increase the distribution of ideas.  These are central themes in two recent IF discussion projects:

• Invention, Innovation, and Intellectual Property – published in March 2014; and
• Creativity and Innovation – a new discussion project just commencing.