Open Innovation Success Stories in the Car Industry

September 29, 2017 By IdeaConnection

Open innovation success stories abound in multiple industries as enterprises the world over seek the wisdom of the crowd to help them develop new products and services, get over innovation roadblocks, see where their industries are heading and to steal a march on their competitors.

In this post, we highlight a few success stories where open innovation has helped to give the automotive industry a boost.

Local Motors produced the world’s first ever 3D-printed car design which consisted of just 40 moving parts. It was built following a six-week 3D Printed Car Design Challenge that saw the submission of more than 200 concepts.

In 2017, Porsche launched an open innovation competition to find new ways to leverage blockchain technology, the technology that powers the crypto currency bitcoin. Although the car maker didn’t reveal any details about the winning concept it did invite the winning startup to take part in an accelerator program to hopefully get to a prototype stage.

In 2013, the motor giant Citroen built the UK’s first crowdsourced car. Members of the public were invited via Facebook to determine the look and other factors of the C1 Connexion model.

An Apps for Vehicles challenge organized by the US government allowed participants to innovate by taking advantage of a slew of vehicle-generated data. It led to the creation of two novel smartphone apps to help drivers save fuel and money and to stay safe on the roads.

Although our final example has nothing to do with the transport industry it is a perfect illustration of how someone working in one field (automotive) can use their background, experience and smarts to innovate in another. Inspired by a trick to extract a lost cork from a wine bottle, a car mechanic invented a childbirth device to deliver babies during prolonged second stage labor.


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Reader Comments


These are such exciting times for young innovators.
We already had the data - it's been being gathered for decades, but now we have the tech to back a lot of these ideas up.

All this combined with the energy and 'can-do' attitude of young innovators means we have so much to look forward to, over the next few years.
Posted by Henry Morgan on October 2, 2017

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