Leaving the door ajar: contests as a means to engage with the comunity.
Résumé
Open innovation encompasses two seemingly orthogonal approaches that firms can adopt to engage with their surroundings. On the one hand, they can focus on long-term loyalty and try to foster a community. On the other hand, they can focus on short-term benefits and source from the crowd. In some cases the long-term objective can be reached by pursuing the short-term goals. In this paper I describe the case of one company, the Mathworks, which, I argue, has fostered a community by repeatedly courting the crowds. It did so by organizing a series of programming contests around its core product MatLab® – and in the process it didn't even have to open its MatLab source.