This week’s feature article in Business Week is titled “The Power of Us”
and talks about how companies are collaborating with users to create
more powerful offers. When users become your partners, the world is
your R&D unit.

Of the example companies that are covered in the article is Skype.
Skype lets users make use of the power of internet to talk to other
skype users or other phone users (via SkypeOut). As of today there were
121M+ downloads of Skype software. The interesting thing about Skype is
that every person that is using Skype is allowing Skype to utilize some
spare computing resources for the benefit of all. So, the more users
jump into this bandwagon, the more computing power there is. What an
amazing example of “leverage”

There are many more examples highlighting open innovation in the article. Don’t miss reading it.