Open innovation through R&D outposts

One of the things I like about Silicon Valley is the many R&D outposts. I am often in touch with people from such units at Sennheiser Communications, BMW, Siemens and Swisscom and I think they have some great – although challenging – jobs. The great part of it is that they get to work on the frontier of innovation in an eco-system that they can usually not find in the countries of their headquarters. Actually, the headquarters is also the biggest challenge as it can be quite difficult to setup knowledge transfer among the different locations.
 
These outposts are great for open innovation. Not only do they create lots of external contacts, they also stretch the mindset of the organization making the employees more comfortable with the fact the innovation and R&D should not only take place at the corporate headquarters. This kind of global 24/7 innovation mindset makes it easier to expand to external partners and thus we have a great pocket of open innovation that can affect the whole innovation culture.
 
It was a short article in BusinessWeek on Corning describing how they have setup an outpost in Silicon Valley that prompted me to write this post. The purpose of the Corning outpost is to suck up new ideas and then relay potential winners to their headquarter in order to develop them into products. It is an interesting challenge. Check the article on this link: Corning R&D Hits the Road