Crowdsourcing a moonshot: can a redesigned toilet help India win the battle against human waste?

Crowdsourced challenges can spur unprecedented innovation leaps at stalled industries. However, these challenges must be quickly inscribed into a believable road to market path to bring to life commercially viable products. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation faced a similar challenge when it tried to revolutionize sanitation in the emerging world by reinventing the toilet with open innovation mechanisms.

Amazon Studios’ experiment in crowdsourcing scripts: were they right to abandon open innovation in developing new content?

In November 2010, Amazon Studios launched and opened its doors to allow anyone with a movie idea to submit a script to potentially be developed at the studio. After 7.5 years and over 27,000 submissions for both TV and film, Amazon pulled the plug on the project in April 2018 [1]. Why did Amazon Studios launch this open innovation platform for content creation? How did it work and why did they end the project? Were they right to stop crowdsourcing scripts for future development?