re:intrapreneurship though- I think you'd have to be very careful in small
businesses with how far you go with this. If the general work culture just become more entrepreneurially minded, then I could see it being productive.

However, if the notion is that champions will be encouraged to spring up and drive new initiatives inside small companies – I would question the feasibility of this from many angles – size, resources, focus, internal conflict etc etc.

Another angle for small businesses is to look for ideas that will help to grow your industry. This can work if you have a new business in a niche market. For example, if you sell supplies that are used for advanced basket weaving, then it would be in your interest to work with others to help grow the basket weaving industry as a whole.

So, one thing that has to be considered, and Stefan mentions this, is whether a company really has the ability to take on something as significant as open innovation. Clearly, it could be used as a competitive advantage. The question in my mind is whether a small company has the management and people foresight to recognize where it can be applied, how and at what cost.

In short, it seems like open innovation needs to be woven tightly into the culture of the organization, and seen as a source of competitive advantage in order for it to succeed in any company. For SMEs in particular, they need to already have a common company dialog and consensus around what makes them unique, their 'secret sauce', in order for them to move to the potentially more organizationally demanding world of open innovation.

SMEs should also take advantage of their relative size to attack from the sides. Avoid taking on the Big Boys head-on. Instead be inventive. Be disruptive. Expose weaknesses in the competition by being awesome on service and delivering exactly what your customers want. Make it a WOW experience from beginning to end.

Easier said than done? Develop these disruptive, game-changing services by constantly micro-testing new ideas. Try stuff. Take forward the good stuff and further refine – elicit feedback from customers throughout. Bin the stuff that fails. Don't be shy.

It is therefore important that the company develops itself in a dominant / recessive way. That will be the best way to strengthen and motivate their resources internally.

Corporations have IP lawyers and can afford them; most small companies and independent innovators don't have that kind of capital especially right now when so many have been laid off from corporate jobs. And, without a lawyer there is a lot of fear about losing control of ideas and inventions in the open innovation paradigm. It is extremely important to the open innovation cause to address these fears and remove them because they are a barrier to having the first conversations with potential collaborators.

We need a free or low cost legal agreement that works to protect these exploratory conversations. It will change the world if we can popularize the open innovation paradigm and facilitate the creation of trust networks among independent innovators and global ad hoc innovation teams.

We need a practical guide to legal agreements in the open innovation world and we need to be able to access agreements we can use. How is this for an innovative idea? We could create something like the creative common's licenses to protect ideas; you write up your idea and stamp it with an "open innovation" license and all the people who participate in the open innovation project "put their stamp" on it. That way, everyone gets credit for the part they play and there is a legal trail to follow.

Any lawyers, investors, designers out there who would care to team up with me on this one?

And one more thing I think independents and small companies need to know about open innovation. I know my comment will be controversial but that's what I want. Beware of the contests. Like the economic stimulus grants that so many thousands of people are now competing for, there is a lot of time and money being wasted on trying to "win." Artists have been pouring their money and hopes down the drain on these contests for years; now scientists, engineers, innovators who are bootstrapping their efforts and need an audience are doing the same. We need to think critically about these "opportunities" and protect the integrity of the "open innovation industry" we are becoming. We need to create the open innovation industry we want and to me that means consciously creating as much individual, social and economic value out of it as we can, for everyone.

All the best,
Cynthia DuVal
Founding Director, Pacific Ethnographic Research Center

We all fall prey to our success and that blinds the thinking and action.. open innovation can help us to see it differently.. to see the mistakes that we are now calling as processes.. and procedures.

I also completely second the view the future lies in collaboration and not in competition.. competition has resulted in false promises, over hyped concepts, and sub standard products.. if we combine our resources to increase effectiveness of products.. customer experience or cost of goods.. we would create a world that will sustain itself for longer period of time rather then depleting the world resources too soon

How can an activity or resource be performed or developed differently at lower cost? How can we lower the cost in reaching a certain performance level? What companies are focusing on low-cost alternatives in this particular business model component but perhaps in another industry? Do we have something to bring to the table to lower our cost of in-licensing? How could collaboration with another actor lower or eliminate our costs?

For small and medium sized companies the cost side is of major importance as Open Innovation also involves transaction costs. For P&G that can scale up an external innovation into a billion dollar brand the transaction costs are small, but for a SME the transaction costs can be substantial.