Ethan Seltzer

Open innovation, taken from the fields of business strategy and technology development, can offer planners fresh insights into their own practice. Open innovation, like citizen participation, goes outside the boundaries of the organization to find solutions to problems and to hand ideas off to partners. A key technique for open innovation is “crowdsourcing,” issuing a challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization. The differences between citizen participation and Internet-based crowdsourcing are discussed. Crowdsourcing case studies are provided as a means for extending an emerging literature.

Results from an earlier study indicated that senior planners in Oregon and Southwest Washington expect planning graduates to be equipped with strong communicative competencies built on a base of broad analytic skills. This article reports on an extension of that study to a survey of planners in California, Florida, Maryland, and New Jersey and confirms that these earlier findings are not unique to the Pacific Northwest. The challenge for planning educators is to design a core curriculum that responds to the skills and competencies demanded in practice and to adjust teaching practices and policies to recognize and reward the types of personal qualities sought by employers. Planning educators must consider carefully the field’s unique contributions and weave substance and values back into the curriculum.