Raising creativity and participation in innovation and knowledge management activities

Knowledge has become one of the important resources for competitiveness and growth world-wide. Innovative and knowledge-based organizations are characterized by better productivity and sustainability in the fast changing business environment nowadays. Technologies are providing many opportunities to support creativity, collaboration and knowledge transfer. However, human factors remain the most essential for the successful implementation of any knowledge management and innovation initiative. How to commit people and motivate them to share knowledge, to be more creative and innovative? How to attract users to be proactive and raise their participation in an open innovation process? How social media could help? These are part of the issues this paper is trying to resolve, making, first, a brief review of recent debates on lead users, co-creation, crowd-sourcing, etc. and highlighting afterwards the challenges for creativity and motivation of users in open innovation.