Open Innovation at OSRAM: User Idea Contest Open on LED technology

Siemens finally has entered the open innovation landscape. They started late with a dedicated and focused initiative, but now have a full-scale open innovation program that shall explore and pilot various new methods of open innovation among their different business units.

One of the first projects is at OSRAM, part of the industry sector of Siemens AG and one of the two leading lighting manufacturers in the world. According to Wikipedia, the name is derived from osmium and Wolfram (German for tungsten), as both these elements were commonly used for lighting filaments at the time the company was founded. Today, OSRAM is a high-tech company in the lighting industry.

And now they step ahead with a user idea contest, which again has been planned and implemented by Hyve AG (Disclosure: I am a member of the board of directors of Hyve AG).

For more than the weeks, the new Innovation Contest is online. OSRAM and Hyve invite designers and other interested persons worldwide to join the "LED-Emotionalize your light"-Idea Contest and to create innovative light solutions with the latest LED technology.

Have a look on the contest at www.led-emotionalize.com

The contest's tagline: "Are you creative? Does technology inspires you? Do you like puzzles? If so, enter the “LED – Emotionalize your light” idea contest today and create your own light concept using the latest LED technology!"

Since the beginning of the contest two weeks ago, the community has already grown up to 200 active users. The participants can submit their own ideas and designs and present them to the community. More than 70 ideas have been submitted, some of them with a really high potential. The community also intensively uses the possibility to discuss and evaluate the contributions.

With the help of this platform a well-established company like OSRAM (respectively Siemens) deliberately considers the creativity of customers and actively integrates them into the development of new products.

The contest is organized in two stages:

• Phase 1: The ideas of all participants are collected and discussed.
• Phase 2: The best designs are jointly advanced by the community.

At the end of each phase a professional jury will evaluate the contributions and select the winners. The winners will receive attractive monetary and non-monetary prizes amounting to 7000€ (again a contest where money is not seen as the core driver of innovation :-)

For more information, head to www.LED-emotionalize.com