Andrei Villarroel: Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation

Tuesday Jan 30, 2012: 5:00 Dinner Lecture: The Firm's Competitive Advantage from Bridging across Distributed Knowledge Silos

The lecture emerges from Andrei's work on Crowdsourcing, on which he recently taught a course at MIT and led two symposia on the topic at the Academy of Management. From his program on "The Global Ecology of Crowdsourcing":

"The online platform economy is growing in significance, offering a virtual labor force with unprecedented opportunities for wealth creation, and traditional businesses and governments with similarly important challenges. The global nature of online distributed organizations often trespasses the boundaries of regulatory frameworks —tax, labor, intellectual property, to name a few— which are typically local. Using case studies, I analyze and explain the opportunities and challenges brought about by this emergent phenomenon in society."

more details about this dinner lecture | Andre's Spring 2009 OD talk, "Strategic Crowdsourcing: Motivating Firm-Sponsored Online Collective Work"

Wednesday Jan 31, 2012: Class: More on Crowdsourcing, and Open Innovation, followed by a group ideation of using crowdsourcing to identify educational needs and create educational offerrings

Review: Ideation processes

• Session 1 materials
  • Ideo Deep Dive
  • Three innovation techniques: Idealized Design, Appreciative Inquiry, Lead User Innovation

• Processes used by the firms we'll be visiting in Boston
  • Continuum ideation videos
  • Synectics processes

About Andrei:

Andrei first came to Organizational Dynamics as a visiting scholar in 2004. I met him at an Academy of Management meeting in August, when he was a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. We discussed our mutual interest in creativity, innovation, Latin America and tango; a one month later he was here in Philadelphia. He stayed for a full year, and became part of my family.

He has since obtained his PhD, won 2 Best Paper Awards (2006 & 2007) from the North American Association for Computational Social and Organization Sciences, worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, took a position as Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation Management at Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, and most recently taught an IAP class "The Crowdcomputing Challenge" at MIT, where he is also Research Affiliate of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

He has returned several times to visit us, and is currently working with the Organizational Dynamics CPR/AED (Automated External Defibrillator) project, applying Crowdsourcing techniques toward improving emergency response performance (saving lives through crowdsourcing).

Andrei was born and raised in Bolivia, won a scholarship to attend college in Switzerland, and has also studied in France and the US. He speaks six natural languages, and can write another half dozen artificial ones. Andrei on LinkedIn