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This paper analyzes NASA's increasing effort to invite greater public participation in its technoscientific work through open innovation methodologies. First we examine why NASA has expanded its use of these approaches, noting the roles of an intertwined set of forcing functions including budget constraints, the growth of scientific data, availability of technological resources, political climate, and committed individuals. Next we outline the strategies the agency has invoked to engage the public in research, technology development, and other activities to advance and shape NASA's mission. As we show, promoting greater public involvement has entailed facilitating the NASA workforce's familiarity with open innovation approaches as well as developing projects and creating outreach strategies appropriate to the envisioned participant base. We then discuss the wide variety of outcomes NASA's open innovation initiatives have yielded in support of NASA research and development objectives as well as benefits to participants and others. We conclude with a discussion of the remaining barriers to the use of open innovation techniques as a standard practice and the strategies in work to overcome those barriers so the full potential of a democratized approach to innovation can be realized.

Participants were asked to consider 4 primary asteroid mitigation options and tradeoffs: • Civil defense • Slow-push orbit change (i.e., gravity tractor) • Kinetic impactors • Nuclear detonation or other blast deflection Participants then discussed two potential impact scenarios (1 and 2), with hypothetical changes, to select their preferred mitigation method, and preferred planetary defense guardian, based on that scenario. The participants were asked whether their technology selections, and guardian preferences, changed based on the different scenarios.

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