What is Open Innovation? Why Indian Businesses Are Crowdsourcing Their Biggest Problems
The Old Way of Solving Business Problems Is Broken
For decades, Indian businesses followed the same playbook when they had a hard problem: hire a consultant, brief an agency, or task an internal team. The result was often expensive, slow, and predictable — the same kinds of people, thinking in the same kinds of ways, producing the same kinds of answers.
Open innovation changes that entirely.
What Is Open Innovation?
Open innovation is the practice of solving business challenges by sourcing ideas, solutions, and perspectives from outside your organisation — from customers, students, independent professionals, researchers, or the general public.
The concept was popularised by Harvard professor Henry Chesbrough, but it's no longer just a Silicon Valley trend. Indian startups, SMEs, and corporates are rapidly adopting open innovation to:
- Access diverse, unconventional thinking that internal teams can't provide
- Get solutions faster and at lower cost than traditional consulting
- Discover emerging talent before their competitors do
- Build brand awareness among student and early-career communities
How Open Innovation Crowdsourcing Works
On a platform like BrainSumo, open innovation works through a challenge-based model:
- A business posts a challenge — a clearly defined problem with context, requirements, and a prize pool
- Solvers browse and submit — students and professionals across India submit their solutions before the deadline
- The company reviews submissions — and rates them based on quality, creativity, and feasibility
- Winners are selected and paid — prize money goes directly to the winner's Indian bank account
The entire process — from posting a challenge to receiving dozens of solutions — typically takes 2–4 weeks.
Why Open Innovation Works Especially Well in India
India has one of the world's largest and youngest talent pools. With over 40 million college students and millions more early-career professionals, the country produces an extraordinary volume of creative, technically skilled, and commercially aware problem solvers every year.
The challenge? Most of this talent never gets a chance to work on real business problems until years into their career. Open innovation platforms like BrainSumo bridge that gap — giving businesses access to fresh perspectives while giving solvers a chance to earn, learn, and build their portfolios on real-world problems.
What Problems Are Best Suited for Open Innovation?
Not every business problem is right for an open innovation challenge. Here's a quick guide:
Well-suited for crowdsourcing:
- Marketing strategy, campaign ideas, and brand positioning
- Product naming, taglines, and consumer-facing copy
- UI/UX design and app feature concepts
- Go-to-market strategy for new products or markets
- Sustainability and ESG initiative design
- Business model innovation and new revenue stream ideas
- Research synthesis — "What do Indian Gen Z consumers think about X?"
Less suited for crowdsourcing:
- Problems requiring access to confidential internal data
- Highly technical engineering work requiring specialised credentials
- Problems with no clear evaluation criteria
How to Write a Great Challenge Brief
The quality of your submissions depends entirely on the quality of your brief. Here's what every strong challenge brief includes:
- Context — Who you are, what your business does, and what the challenge is about
- The problem — Clearly stated, with any constraints or non-negotiables
- What a good solution looks like — Be specific. "We want a marketing strategy" is vague. "We want a 3-month social media strategy targeting 18–25 year old urban women in Tier 1 cities, with a monthly budget of ₹50,000" gets you actionable submissions.
- Evaluation criteria — What will you judge submissions on? Creativity, feasibility, originality, depth of research?
- Prize structure — How many winners, and how much does each win?
Real Results: What to Expect
Companies that run well-structured open innovation challenges on BrainSumo typically receive 20–80 submissions per challenge. Even with a modest prize pool of ₹25,000, you're getting the concentrated brainpower of dozens of motivated solvers — at a fraction of what an agency would charge for a single strategy deck.
Beyond the winning solution, companies often find value in runner-up submissions too — unexpected angles, data points they hadn't considered, or creative framings they can build on.
Get Started with Open Innovation on BrainSumo
Posting your first open innovation challenge on BrainSumo is straightforward. Create a client account, describe your challenge, set your prize pool, and go live — typically within 24–48 hours after admin review.
India's most creative problem solvers are already on the platform. The only question is: what challenge will you post first?