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Open Innovation
Written by: John HeapArticle Overview: For smaller companies particularly, the resources inside the company might be too small to allow real innovation to flourish. The principle behind Open Innovation is that you can partner with others to exploit greater thinking power ... and you can exploit the intellectual property of others. So if you can work with others to mutual advantage (perhaps many others ... and hence the term 'crowdsourcing') why would you not?
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Open Innovation
Open
Innovation is s a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, of the Center for Open Innovation at UC
Berkely, in his book Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and
profiting from technology. It is
based on the concept that in a connected, networked, knowledge-based world an
organisation cannot rely on its own innovation capability and capacity but must
exploit the thinking of others – by buying or licensing external intellectual
property (IP). The term ‘open
innovation’ was suggested by the open source, software concept whereby
collaborative projects involving previously unlinked individuals or groups can
result in concerted and co-ordinated effort towards agreed goals.
An example:
Procter & Gamble initiated their open innovation program when they learned
that for each of their 7,500 R&D people there were 200 people outside the
company with equal skills and competences.
What a resource if it could be (at least partially) tapped.
There is now an open innovation ‘movement’ and a number of
organisations that act as ‘knowledge brokers’ (or ‘ideas matchmakers’) to
assist in the process of locating and licensing appropriate IP … and a number
of tools that claim to facilitate open innovation.
The ‘movement’ has also expanded and branched into other concepts and
areas of practice such as ‘crowdsourcing’(a word coined in 2006) – the practice
of issuing a call for ideas or collaboration and ‘stitching together’ as many
of the respondents as possible (a form of ‘distance brainstorming’).
Open Innovation is not ‘new clothes for old practises’. Much of the claimed open innovation practice
seems to be between commercial organisations and university research
departments. This has always gone on …
but now they call it by a new name!
The real development is open innovation have been in the partnerships
created by commercial organisations and in the ways in which technology (and
especially social network services) have made different working practices
possible.
Of course a move from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ innovation can cause tensions
within an organisation … the R&D department that thought it was responsible
for innovation might feel ‘squeezed out’ (though relying on R&D departments
for innovation never was a good recipe for innovation in my book). As such they
might be ‘protectionist’ espousing open innovation but not practising it. An open innovation initiative should be
lead - or at least championed – by a
senior executive who can change behaviours.
The aim is to be open enough so that potential partners see you as the
partner of choice – the easiest to deal with.
Of course adopting open innovation can help smaller companies get
access to resources that would otherwise be outside of their reach. However if they partner with larger, more established
organisations there is a risk that they lose their voice. There is also the risk that the flexible,
creative, small organisation gets ‘frozen’ into rigid work practices by their
larger partner.
Involving
customers or users is helpful – but not enough.
They can help direct innovation towards customer needs (knowing WHERE to
innovate is always a good thing!) but open innovation, involving external
partners, also looks at HOW that innovation might be delivered.
As with innovation itself, open innovation often needs a change of
culture – to one focused strongly on teams and on ideas … and the mix of the
two. There are things you can do –
temporary co-location of teams, assigning overlapping tasks to different
organisational ‘silos’, frequent prototyping and review, etc – to help change
the culture … but it only works if the key individuals at the top of the
organisation ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’.
Open
innovation is not easy to accomplish – but it can offer new inputs into the
organisation and it can deliver …. Innovation!
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Article Tags: crowdsourcing, ideas, innovation, open innovation, partnering
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