Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

Chapter 2

Intellectual Property, Confidentiality, and Brands

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

The smartphone. The organizations that make them are competing for one of the greatest prizes of our time—access to 6 billion phone subscribers. There’s never been a competition quite like this before. For our discussion, the battle for the smartphone market presents a unique opportunity to explore how competition and cooperation coexist. If we are to benefit from crowdstorm processes, we need to understand how working with outside talent will challenge a number of established norms for brand, confidentiality, and intellectual property strategies.

Outside Talent on the Edges

The advertising for one of the best-known smartphones, Apple’s iPhone, has followed a clear arc.1 When the iPhone was first launched in 2007, Apple introduced customers to the main features—calls, e-mail, music, and web browsing. But one year later, they switched the focus to applications (or apps) that can be run on the phone to give it new capabilities. Ads about apps demonstrated the many, many, many ways in which the iPhone can become much more than a phone: Apps let customers read a restaurant review, an MRI, or a book, fix a bookshelf, find a cab, or split a restaurant bill, find a hostel, and translate speech into a foreign language.

Why is this ...