Forget the idea of a lone inventor coming up with a genius idea in his garage. The future of innovation is in the crowd, and by using a big group’s best ideas, you can find the best way to solve any problem. 

Whether you like it or not, competition today is fierce. And it’s only going to get fiercer. Where the old battleground was price and efficiency, the new one will be innovation and time to market. The tech startup world has Eric Ries’s Lean Startup movement, which teaches us how to be fast (and iteratively build a product which consumers love, the fabled "market fit"). But it doesn’t tell us a lot about innovation.

This piece is part of a Collaborative Fund-curated series on creativity and values written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space. Innovation has been studied for as long as economists have tried to make sense of the modern organization. The quintessential question centers around the weird black box with the ominous label "creativity." Today everybody seems to try to emulate the genius of Steve Jobs, not realizing that he’s the outlier. But there is a different way, a way that has brought us many breakthrough inventions in fields as far reaching as technology, sports, and medicine. That way is open innovation.

To read the full, original article click on this link: 5 Lessons For Using Open Innovation To Maximize The Wisdom Of The Crowd | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation