An Outsider’s Perspective on Innovation and AI

Remember 2008? The ‘AI’ that rattled the established innovation world? It wasn’t code. It wasn’t found in algorithms and silicon. It was the collective intelligence of ordinary people, unleashed by open innovation platforms. Open innovation turned outsiders into disruptors.

Some years ago, the landscape shifted once again. Over 15 years went by and here we are. Today, AI is the new open innovation, democratizing access to powerful tools and technologies, and blurring the lines between insiders and outsiders, and between humans and machines. But the core challenge remains the same: embracing change, adapting to new realities, and harnessing the collective intelligence to drive [feel free to fill in the blanks].

This is a counterpoint, a narrative shaped by my own experience-driven journey within open innovation (OI), to a LinkedIn post I lost in the scroll last evening —a post about a NASA upset when they engaged with OI. An almost retired engineer from rural Hampshire provided a solution that challenged NASA’s top minds. This upset revealed a reality they weren’t ready to accept: the world of innovation is changing.

Everyone, insiders included, must shift from problem solvers to solution seekers, must actively seek out and understand the right problems to solve. This means recognizing that even the most esteemed experts are, at their core, ordinary people with a unique set of skills and experiences to offer. I’ve seen this dynamic play out firsthand, over and over, in my own journey.

The author’s POV: insiders must abandon their identities to embrace openness. Coming from the other side of the spectrum, I have a different take. And to make sense of it, I must share some vulnerable parts of my story.

Forget the Ivory Tower, Innovation Happens in Gas Stations

The Renegade Innovators

I’m coming straight from the trenches, the other side of open innovation, a community of serial award-winning problem solvers honed in the early days of InnoCentive. We are the veterans, then navigating the nascent field of modern OI. Even now, years later, some of us continue this work. I know the sting of being perceived as the „rural” innovator, whose value was often underestimated, from perception to payment.

I witnessed countless top challenges, seeing fellow solvers craft not just effective solutions, but beautiful and inspiring ones. They were coming from all walks of life, ages and cultures.

We became unwitting ‘lab mice’ for those inside the established innovation systems. Researchers at Harvard’s Crowd Innovation Lab were curious about us, the open innovation solvers on platforms like HeroX and Innocentive. What drove us? Why did we pour our energy into these challenges? Was it the allure of tackling fascinating problems, the thrill of competition, the desire to make a difference, or simply the pursuit of prize money? As part of their research, they interviewed 18 challenge winners, myself included, to understand the motivations behind our participation in the open innovation community. Back in 2017, after seven years in the open innovation world, I had designed over 60 solutions and won 10. This meant a 10% success rate in challenges where I was competing against hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other worldwide solvers.

The Clash of Innovation Cultures: Formal vs. Informal

Fast forward to my immersion in the formalized side of innovation, and the stark ideological divide hits me like a wall. It’s as profound as the difference between left and right in politics, between the domesticated and the wild. This isn’t just an intellectual clash; it’s deeply rooted in our consciousness, an emotional and mental challenge. In my essay The Tyranny of Happiness and Abundance: Politics of Utopia in Communism, Capitalism and Internet, I explore deeper roots of this confusion.

This disparity is amplified also by the chasm in compensation. While the „city” innovators & consultants, now solution seekers, were entrenched in established systems, earning up many times more for our solutions, we played a high-stakes lottery for far less.

Our drive stemmed from a different source, a passionate fire that burned within us. Through countless interviews and conversations with solvers, I discovered a shared thread: we possessed well-defined identities. That was our „smart-edge.” Yet, this vibrant and diverse community of „outsiders” was often overlooked and underestimated by the established players. 

Perhaps we weren’t always in the right place at the right time, or maybe, just maybe, looking back, we were exactly where we needed to be.

Innovation on the Road: Where Necessity Fuels Creativity

Life’s curveballs, like my own, forced us to solve problems on cracked laptops and smartphones in gas stations, as they provided free internet. The survival of many of us depended on being the best, the most compelling. But this time, at a global scale.

It was no longer enough to be good designers, performers and writers, but also skilled salespeople and visual thinkers in a language that was not our own. For non-native English speakers like myself, it was a double challenge, a triple one for generalists in a world of specialists like, yep, me again.

Uniqueness, originality and our experience in the school of life, the traits that always worked against us, now were our only advantages. It was not our degrees and certificates.

Embracing the Hunt: Tracking Down the Right Questions

All my victories came in fields outside my knowledge and for top-level challenges, complex problems involving systems architecture, strategy and operations. I became a hunter, seeking out problems I could tackle.

When asked how I did it, how my skill set—officially limited, it seemed—could solve seemingly unrelated issues, like the proliferation of dual-use technologies challenge to combat terrorism, for example, a field I was utterly unfamiliar with. Yet, as a necessity entrepreneur from a little-known country, always transitioning and fighting corruption, I found a way.

Take, for instance, a business model design I developed in my car at the gas station. My award for that challenge was split with a high-ranking bank executive based in the USA, someone who undoubtedly had access to far more information and resources than I did. This highlights the beautiful contrast inherent in open innovation, where individuals from vastly different backgrounds and circumstances can contribute and succeed.

The „Dream Factory”: Not So Dreamy After All

Filmmaking had always been my calling, a dream I held since childhood. So, naturally, my journey led me to the „dream factory” of the film industry. But to my surprise, I found innovation stagnating, especially in film production and distribution. This stagnation created unnecessary struggles for indie filmmakers like myself, making a sustainable career in filmmaking feel like a distant dream. I hadn’t realized how much support was needed to thrive in this field. Seeking a way to overcome these obstacles, I embarked on a PhD, hoping to find solutions not only for myself but for the filmmaking community as a whole.

But here’s the twist: after a decade of thriving in the open innovation space, my diverse background became a challenge once again. I had to find a balance between my artistic aspirations and the practical demands of life. I was no longer the carefree innovator of my 20s or 30s. At 40, with life’s uncertainties swirling around me, doubts crept in. Was it too late to pursue my artistic dreams? Was I being unrealistic?

At this juncture, I faced a trilemma: to delve into film production management within Economics, to explore information management through Cinema for organically discoverable films, or to unravel creativity management for enhanced distribution within Information Science? In the end, my heart cast the deciding vote, and the balance shifted irrevocably towards art and culture.

Navigating the Shadows: Self-Doubt and Unexpected Hurdles

A thought struck me: perhaps I wouldn’t achieve my dream of telling stories through film, and maybe I wouldn’t be fully embraced by the established artistic community. But I could still contribute to the field, make a difference somehow.

It resonated with the same mindset that had propelled me through my open innovation and life journey: if I couldn’t solve my own problems from where life insisted me to be, I could at least help others solve theirs. At the end of my life, I wanted to be able to say firmly, ‘I was not irrelevant.’ Maybe my ego is too big, I don’t know, but this feeling drove me forward.

This is where I am now, 3 months away from the finish line of my PhD, learning more about innovation and creativity than I ever imagined. Unexpectedly, my mom’s Alzheimer’s has become a profound source of inspiration, forever changing my relationship with pain and loss, but also with attention and curiosity. As the Fear of Your Parents’ Old Age beautifully said it:

Every child is the parent of their parent’s death, and perhaps the old age of a father or mother is, curiously, the final pregnancy. Our last lesson.

Challenges never took a break. But where else can we find such beauty and innovation as in literature and poetry?

Pointless Hurdles and Meaningless Obstacles

Yet, the left-right divide persisted. I was an outsider.

To gain entry in my small dream factory, I undertook an unnecessary MFA, a two-year initiation to prove my dedication and harmlessness.

But there was another layer to my outsider status: I was a returned emigrant. In their eyes, I must have failed in the other country if I came back. The irony was, I didn’t even understand the concept of failure—for me, it was just a sketch for success, a draft. I laughed inwardly. It felt pointless to explain my emigration story, as their perceptions and conclusions were already set in stone. It was the same „by default” mindset I had encountered before.

In vocational schools, especially in the arts, value is intrinsically linked to uniqueness and identity. And while this environment felt more welcoming than any I had experienced before, my hope of finally finding „home” seemed naive and humbling in the face of these ingrained biases. I never understood Fellini’s Cabiria better. It made me wonder, how many of us are out there, searching for a place to belong, only to be met with prejudice and misunderstanding?

„Insecure Overachivers”

Like in the war of sexes, I had to overprove myself, navigate rigid systems and entrenched mindsets. In a Harvard article – If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? I found this struggle labeled as being an „insecure overachiever” and I wondered about how simultaneously precise and parallel with reality, and cultural biased, such tag is. We are all creative beings, being insecure is the natural way of life. There are endless variables in the midst at any given moment in the journey of an idea to reality. 

Many employers disrespect your value and undermine your security, making it very easy to become an „insecure overachiever.” They control so much, even your healthcare. If you lose your job, it’s not just financial insecurity you face; it’s a stark reminder that they own your well-being, your very body. There’s a lot of fear out there, and it’s a legitimate fear, a fear that permeates every aspect of your existence.

It’s more than ego and identity when it comes to established insiders; it’s a primal fear of the unpredictable, fear of „warriors”, „chameleons”, „shape shifters”, of people who defy categorization. A very old story. As old as the world itself.

The Art of Pitching in the Dark

Another challenge in open innovation was „pitching in blind,” deciphering unspoken needs and adapting to unseen audiences.

We developed a night vision, a skill unnecessary for insiders.

When change is forced upon us, we lose the power to control the outcome

In my experience, true openness comes only through forced change, an emotional intelligence reflex born of necessity. Few willingly embrace it as a daily training.

We usually change something when there are no other options left. We resist it until resistance becomes futile. That stops us from developing change as a reflex, as a muscle, it stops the elasticity of the mind and the expansion of our identity, emotions, and imagination. And this elasticity is the fundamental condition for creativity and resilience. What is resilience if not being well regardless how life is?

The Paradox of Stability: Embracing Change in an Unpredictable World

In those early days of open innovation, we were the AI, anticipating the future and often solving problems that wouldn’t emerge for years to come. We were, in a sense, designing the future. And we remain so, having already lived it from multiple perspectives

It’s not about abandoning your identity to embrace openness. It’s about remembering it. Recalling the core reasons you pursued innovation and creativity in the first place, and critically examining your current motivations, especially in the face of status-quo challenges, harships and crisis.

Constant change, instability and unpredictability is the state of life; it just wasn’t visible at this scale. At least, not so much from the inside.

We don’t need to be open, but well-defined. We don’t need to abandon our identities, but to embrace them fully, to stop fearing the unknown within ourselves.

We crave stability, yet we’re never truly content when we settle for less than our full potential, especially for the sake of security—a fragile and volatile notion in today’s world.

Rest, have fun, but settle with care!

There is no separation between AI and us. We are the AI.

P.S. Curious about the challenges I tackled as an open innovation problem-solver? You can find a curated list of my solutions on the Problem Solving page, alongside with my more recent work in Cinema and Media, including titles derived from my research on semantic film production framework.