I'm being asked on a regular basis now to explain Open Innovation, which is what the startup I'm part of, Fellowforce.com, is all about. Let me see if I can put this in a nutshell, or clamshell perhaps.
In this dynamic, shifting, hyper-competitive global economy, most companies cannot simply stay 'inside the aquarium' anymore and expect to thrive. Open Innovation enables any company or organization to go 'outside in' for innovation. You can Crowdsource, which I like to describe as fishing for ideas in the open ocean. Never know, you might land a marlin. Or you can Crowdcast (also called narrowcasting), where you decide you want to solicit help from a more narrow group of experts. This is like fishing in a stocked pond. At Fellowforce.com, it's a closed Challenge, as opposed to an open one.
There's a third one, that I like very much. It's for all of you 'Eureka Moment' creatives. You could be a stay-at-home mom, a painter, a plumber, an engineer, anyone ... who comes up with one or more brilliant ideas. At least potentially brilliant. An innovation to a product currently on store shelves, a new product that you couldn't make on your own, or a service that you think an existing company should implement.
The Innovation Box at Fellowforce.com is for you folks. Just take your fish (idea), wrap it up (we provide the online form for that), and present it to an existing company or organization (we do that for you). The Innovation Box. Give us your fish!
(OH!! and please remember to stop by Fellowforce.com to enter our Tagline Challenge. A tagline is a variant of a branding slogan. So put on your creative thinking cap, and come up with a new tagline to attract 'Fellows' to our site. If yours is picked best, you get 1% of our company. And who knows how much that could be worth down the road a bit :-)

