This paper presents an approach to increase the creativity of ideas/solutions in an idea contest. Analog to a letter in a bottle tasks are distributed in a randomized way to potential problem solvers. The idea contest is a method from Open Innovation which opens a company’s innovation process to its environment (e.g. customers, suppliers). By using idea contests the creative potential of a large crowd of people can be used for developing innovative solutions for a specific task. Nevertheless, based on experience from industry projects we found that creativity often is limited. This paper presents an approach for increasing the creative potential of participants. The new integrated method combines idea contest with lead user’s methods and aspects from synectics and communication.     «

This paper presents an approach to increase the creativity of ideas/solutions in an idea contest. Analog to a letter in a bottle tasks are distributed in a randomized way to potential problem solvers. The idea contest is a method from Open Innovation which opens a company’s innovation process to its environment (e.g. customers, suppliers). By using idea contests the creative potential of a large crowd of people can be used for developing innovative solutions for a specific task. Nevertheless, ba...     »