Great Lessons From Orlando: The Open Innovation Summit

I enjoyed the inaugural Open Innovation Summit which took place in Orlando last week. As always, some speakers were better than others, but the overall quality was high and I really liked the networking part of the event. Most of the leading firms on open innovation were present and the same goes for the bloggers and thought-leaders on the topic.

I have inserted some articles, links, quotes and comments below. You should also check the #OIS09 Twitter stream which works as a great recap of the summit.

Andrea Meyer interviews James Todhunter, CTO at InventionMachine. A key point of this article is that when you are reviewing the ideas submitted to your open innovation portal, you need to identify ideas that have momentum and ideas that are outliers.

By the way: I was amazed to learn that InventionMachine is a 200-person strong company. It did a lot to quell my scepticism towards the many software companies in this field.

Michael Arndt from BusinessWeek was not only the chair-man of the summit. He also contributed with a couple of blog postings: Cisco’s Failures in Corporate Alliances and Open Innovation’s Secret: It Takes A Crisis

Phil McKinney, CTO at HP gave a great keynote to kick-off the summit. Winning In The Innovation Economy

Braden Kelley had written about the key points and insights of a previous talk given by Moises Norena, Director of Global Innovation at Whirlpool.

Selected quotes/comments from the speakers:

Russ Conser, Shell: Innovations don’t look good early. Only in hindsight is their value understood.

Lem Lasher, CSC: Identify the next practices, not the best practices. Freshness of mind is needed to identify these.

Pramod Reddy, P&G: Our open innovation goal is to become the partner of choice for open innovation and collaboration.

Stephen Hoover, Xerox: How do we respond to competitive copying? – We focus on trying to make it easier to partner with us. It’s a race to be faster!

John Tao, Weyerhaeuser: Response to question on whether to eliminate internal R&D altogether: “Open innovation is not about outsourcing.”

Moises Norena, Whirlpool: Whirlpool operationalized the innovation definition. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done.”

Phil McKinney, HP: Ideas without an execution is a hobby.

You can also check the presentation from my pre-conference workshop here: Open Innovation Summit 2009

The organizers are already working on the second event which is to take place in August. I plan to be there and I will keep you posted on this.