How business can address sensitive cultural challenges through tech-enabled, large-scale open collaboration and innovation with stakeholders

Purpose The authors explain how companies can use open innovation to embrace game-changing innovation through intensive collaboration with society’s stakeholders on fraught cultural and human resource issues. Design/Methodology/Approach The InnovationJam is a technology platform that enables a form of crowdsourcing connecting audiences of several hundred to hundreds of thousands of concurrent ‘jammers’ over a 30-72 hour period to explore business and societal issues in an open, collaborative format. Findings Crowdsourcing insight from committed participants can help to engage communities in active problem solving and implementing solutions. Practical/implications The approach gives voice to individuals who are often unheard within organizations given traditional confines of a job role, function and hierarchy. Originality/value In a time when social media often has a negative impact, the Jam proved that technology can serve as a catalyst for important, sensitive discussion and to bring people together who otherwise could never meet.