The FORTUNE Business Innovation blog is pleased to announce the third of its “Get Back in the Box” contests. Douglas Rushkoff, a globally-recognized thought leader on media, marketing and Internet culture, has created a third reader contest based around the open source model of innovation as described in his forthcoming book Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out:

“The companies most threatened by the open source model of innovation are the ones that see their greatest innovations as behind them. If you’ve already invented your best cell phone, mop, marketing methodology, or catcher’s mitt, you will spend more time guarding your secrets than coming up with new ones. Even if you enjoy a competitive advantage today, you carry on with the lingering knowledge that it’s only a matter of time before someone else figures out a better way to do what you do. To stave off this inevitability, you lock down your advantage and processes as much as possible and maintain a closed source enterprise — even to yourself.”

Based on that excerpt from Rushkoff, “What examples can you give of a non-computer-related business that has, nonetheless, opened itself up to collaborative innovation?” For example, did you know Procter and Gamble has an entire division now dedicated to collaborating with other companies on new technologies? That’s how they got Mr. Clean Magic Eraser!

Submit your selections over the next few days for your favorite example of an open source innovation model and you could win a free, autographed copy of Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out by Douglas Rushkoff. The most innovative entry, as judged by Douglas, is the winner. That’s all you need to know – so start submitting today (either by adding comments to this blog entry or sending email responses with “CONTEST” in the subject line to: basulto@gmail.com).

John Winsor, author of Beyond the Brand and a contributor to the BrandShift blog, recently published a new book, SPARK: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation, that offers a fascinating inside look at how top executives at companies like Nike, Patagonia, Levi Strauss & Co. and Miller Brewing Company have mapped out successful innovation strategies. In total, the book includes 16 profiles of marketing and branding experts who have discovered their own personal secrets to innovation. For all of them, though, meaningful innovation came about through a process of co-creation with their customers, partners and employees.

At times, the number of perspectives and insights presented in the book can be a bit overwhelming - but the book is more like a portable resource full of anecdotes, innovation tips and pointers to useful resources, all tied together by the broad theme of “co-creation.” In the intro to the book, John even asks readers to “write in it. Draw in it. Tape stuff to it. Rip it up!” - so the book is obviously intended as a living, breathing resource. At the end of each innovation profile, in fact, there’s a list of 10-15 resources provided by John to guide you on the path to co-creation and innovation (as well as some blank space to doodle, draw or brainstorm).

As a result, each chapter offers a grab bag of innovation delights. For example, in the chapter featuring Johnnie Moore (a London-based branding consultant who also contributes to the BrandShift blog), John includes citations from the journal Mechanical Engineering, a link to the Website Improv Across America, and a reference to the New Yorker Book of Business Cartoons. In the section about Rob Bon Durant (director of brand development at Patagonia), John includes (among other items) an article from the Harvard Business Review, a link to the Treehugger website, and a reference to a playful book called Work Like Your Dog: 50 Ways to Work Less, Play More and Earn More.

If you’re putting together a PowerPoint presentation about innovation anytime soon, these end-of-chapter resource guides can become a goldmine of cool ideas and links. If you’re interested in the book, there’s apparently also a companion SPARK blog.

At the FORTUNE Business Innovation blog, we’re pleased to announce the winner of our latest “Get Back In the Box” contest promotion. Scott Rubin’s winning entry, which described how the Nintendo brand has become a form of social currency for consumers, was judged as the best overall entry by Douglas Rushkoff.

Douglas explains why Scott is the winner of a free autographed copy of his forthcoming book Get Back In the Box:

“The winner is Scott Rubin, for his astute and multi-faceted appraisal of Nintendo as social currency. Scott’s was the only entry that looked at both how the brand is serving as a social currency for old school Nintendo users, as well how the technology itself has been retooled to allow for social interaction between users while they play.

Honorable mention to nominators of Apple - a company that has certainly demonstrated full knowledge of the power of social currency - and Verizon, a company that is showing a growing understanding of some of the basic principles at play. Some of the others, while examples of interesting and clever marketing schemes, didn’t relate directly the principles of social currency.”

For all the Nintendo fans out there, here’s an extended excerpt from Scott’s winning entry:

“Apple would normally be the obvious choice for the brand with the most social currency value, but I think that today Nintendo is beating them out.

In the past few years Nintendo has been selling official merchandise through stores like Hot Topic. These t-shirts, hats, etc. are all advertisements that say “I played Nintendo back in the day”. People who are in college and high school now are buying this stuff up like crazy. They don’t actually want it to have a conversation with Nintendo about the old school days, they want to use the Nintendo brand to find other like-minded people.

Nowadays kids are growing up never having even seen the original Nintendo or even the Super Nintendo. 10 years ago this was unheard of. If you tell someone who grew up with the original NES that the first RPG you played was Final Fantasy 7 or that the first Mario you played was Mario 64 it blows their minds. They’ll look at you like some strange creature who knows nothing about video games. So they are turning back to their childhood with shirts that say “know your roots” or “classically trained” in order to find the shrinking number of people they can identify with. There was a machine that identified the first ten to 15 years of their lives and now they are using the brand as social currency to connect with others who had the same experience.

But to give Nintendo the extra points they came out with the Nintendo DS. Not only does the Nintendo DS have great games and everything, but you can use the device itself to communicate with other DS users nearby. It uses wireless internet technology to allow people to write and draw small monochrome messages to each other in a chat room, but not over the Internet (yet). They can only communicate within a certain distance of one another. But what you end up seeing is that at any event where there are likely to be many geeks like LAN parties, anime conventions, geek trade shows, etc. There is an immediate network of Nintendo DS users that forms. They find complete strangers with pictochat and then play games against each other… The Nintendo brand is the most effective social currency out there right now.”

Congratulations, Scott!

[image: nahuel31 via flickr]

As “Innovation!” becomes the rallying cry of corporations around the globe, Clint Witchalls of Computing Business (U.K.) takes a closer look at whether British companies have managed to keep up with the global innovation leaders. According to a number of innovation benchmarking studies cited by Clint - such as those conducted by the GEM Consortium and the World Economic Forum - Britain ranks anywhere between 10th and 13th among the nations of the world in terms of innovation. Good, but not great.

The article does a great job of wrapping up current thinking about the state of U.K. innovation, drawing on insights from, among others, London Business School strategy expert Julian Birkinshaw. There’s also a nice goodie at the end of the article - a case study of Shell’s GameChanger initiative, which was conceived as a bottoms-up way of encouraging innovation throughout the company:

“When you work for a company with more than 100,000 employees, getting your bright idea recognised, funded and transformed into an innovation can be an onerous task. Not at Shell. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant has implemented a team called GameChanger to fast-track bright ideas…

GameChanger mimics the way venture capital works. Employees submit a proposal via email to a team of mid-level managers. The proposal is more anecdotal than quantitative; at this stage it is just a high-level idea. GameChanger teams meet weekly to discuss the ideas. The proposals are pre-screened to see if they fit the following set of criteria…

If the proposal passes pre-screening, it is allocated a sponsor whose role is to find a qualified Shell employee to champion the idea. Once a champion has been found, a brief screening panel is convened, comprising the person who submitted the proposal, the champion, and representatives of the GameChanger team. A decision is made at the meeting as to whether the idea should be converted into a formal proposal. If it receives the green light, the formal project proposal will be presented to an extended panel and a decision will be made within two working days. The process usually takes between five days and two months. The seed funding, which can be in the region of £50,000 upwards, is used to develop a full business plan.”

[image: Vintage Shell, via ssomerfeld on Flickr]

Usually, we have to wait until after Thanksgiving for the “Best of” lists to start circulating at the major media publications. It’s a real treat, then, to see that Time Magazine has already put out its “Most amazing inventions of 2005″ issue even before we’ve had a chance to pick up a turkey at the local supermarket. Inside the issue, there’s a story about cloned dogs in South Korea, smart robots from Toshiba, automatic doors that conform perfectly to a person’s shape, thin skins that mimic the sense of touch, glow-in-the-dark ant farms, and gardens that grow upside down.

Granted, the glow-in-the-dark ant farms appear to be uniquely American, but a quick run-through of these inventions seems to indicate that almost half of these inventions are emanating from Asian R&D labs. The automatic doors are designed in Japan, the cloned dogs are from South Korea, the talking-and-watching robots are from Toshiba and the sense-equipped robot hands are from Tokyo. Is that a sign, perhaps, that U.S. innovation is losing its competitive edge?

It looks like Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and the creator of the term “disruptive technology,” is a big fan of Google. Inspired by a recent article that detailed the innovation process at Google, Innoblog (the public blog of Innosight, Clayton Christensen’s consulting firm) has put together a list of the three major innovation drivers at Google. In addition to acting like a venture capitalist as it sources ideas from around the world, the company also puts tremendous emphasis on the rigor and discipline of its idea-creation process. At the same time, Google has created a culture where senior management often takes a lead role in the innovation process. Here’s an excerpt from Natalie Pinchaud’s blog posting:

“It is nice that Google mentions that not only creativity is key to their success, but so are the rigor and discipline behind their approach. The company has eight brainstorming sessions each year with 100 engineers. Six concepts are pitched and discussed for ten minutes each. The stated goal is to build on the initial idea with at least one complementary idea per minute…

Google recognizes that it is not enough to allow anyone at the firm to post thoughts for new technologies and businesses to mailing lists. They have instituted supporting processes that are led by management. Marissa Mayer, the Director of Web Products at Google, has open office hours much like a college professor where employees can talk through ideas. Google’s personalized home page came out of this process. Also, all engineers have one day a week to develop their own pet projects, no matter how far from the company’s central mission. Google News came out of this process.”

[pic: Everyday life inside Google]

Drawing on the idea of a “personal creativity model” developed by Bengt Järrehult of Swedish paper & packaging company Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, Dave Pollard (author of the How to Save the World blog) has refined his framework of the organizational innovation cycle. Pollard explains how the two models are related:

“Creative organizations invite us to apply [Bengt Järrehult’s] creative process to organizational creative and innovative tasks. In organizational creative work, we collectively (a) learn, (b) listen/observe, (c) explore, (d) understand, (e) organize, (f) imagine, (g) reach out, and (h) brainstorm (leftmost 8 boxes of the inner circle of this chart). In organizational innovation work, we collectively (i) canvass the ‘crowd’ for confirmation that our ideas meet a genuine need, (j) design, (k) experiment, (l) question/challenge, and (m) realize the idea into a successful offering (rightmost 5 boxes of inner circle of this chart).

Using this (admittedly rather bulky) framework, Pollard points out why so many organizations have a difficult time transforming creative talent and new ideas into groundbreaking innovation:

“Organizations rarely invite people to apply their personal creativity to organizational challenges, so the available ideas and talent are largely unused and eventually dry up. This is because most organizations (a) are not set up to tap this talent, (b) don’t really trust most of their employees to be able to apply their creative abilities and imagination in a productive, effective way, and (c) are averse to true innovation, as Christensen explains, because their intense focus on customers discourages them from doing anything different from what has satisfied customers to date — i.e. what they’re already doing today…

Organizations are not stupid. They have achieved success by effectively meeting customers’ needs. They are not motivated to change what they’re doing until something averse happens — dropping revenues due to a competitor’s disruptive innovation or a dramatic change in the economy, buying criteria or demographics. Too often, by the time this happens it is too late.”