ABSTRACT
Sami Viitamki is one part marketing practitioner and one part management academic. He completed his studies with a Masters Thesis on Crowdsourcing, which eventually led to the conception of the FLIRT model. Leading businesses have already for decades built and utilized networks and collectives external to their organization for increasing innovativeness, fuelling growth and maximizing efficiency. Effective business development and marketing at present requires constant collaboration with external entities. The FLIRT model presented in this chapter is a framework that identifies the key issues and the drivers of collective collaboration for commercial purposes. A major US biotech company was in a hard place. Its internal science team had been struggling to develop a method for a cost-effective detection of DNA sequences that would be robust enough for extreme field conditions. The retail giant Wal-Mart found itself venturing into the social networking arena in the late summer of 2006, as they launched their social networking site The Hub.
