I would suggest another reason for failure : the lack of targetting of the contributors. It's like going on facebook and waiting for 'fans' and 'likes' ; it won't work ! I think successful communities like Innocentive or eYeka do have success because their gather the solvers, the creatives. What do you think ?

I suggest you take a look at this: http://frontendofinnovation.blogspot.com/2009/05/…

General Mills as a good graps on setting up open innovation that works through their 5 steps program. Again open innovation needs to be focused and organized. Failure deals with the understanding of the risks you are taking…and how you manage it…due diligence is of the essence in any type of innovation process…

«To make open innovation a reality, General Mills took a hard look at intellectual property issues. After setting up processes to address them, they got comfortable with the risk vs benefit calculation and moved forward.

General Mills' G-WIN is now an industry model of leveraging partners for open innovation. The company is highly engaged with its supplier partner network, with a very good feel for issues and opportunities. As Jim Collins discussed yesterday, they are a company with a culture of constant choice.»

If you are trying to do more incremental or product innovation, it seems like it is hard to find people on the outside that will understand your products, your culture and your markets well enough to really provide great ideas unless they are already competitors. So you end up getting a lot of the same ideas for new features or line extensions that don't add a lot of value. We have been most successful getting our internal people to look at other industries and other products for ideas and approaches that we can adapt to our products and markets. I think that is a form of open innovation (looking out from within), but others might not agree. I have not seen a lot of internal resistance to ideas that come in this way.

If you are trying to do business model innovation or are trying to look for the "blue ocean" opportunities, I think outside partners have a lot more to offer. It seems to me that it is hard for the average person inside a company to "forget" enough about the company does today to do a good job of business model innovation or new/adjacent market creation without more direct help from the outside (looking in from outside). There are obviously exceptions to that statement, but on average that has been my experience. I think this is where corporate anitbodies get in the way the most. I am still trying to figure out how to get better at this.

I am trying to facilitate this type of process on two fronts right now: partnerships with "sister" companies that are part of our parent company, and partnerships with outside companies. I am having some success with the "sister" companies, less with the outside companies. My approach with the "sister" companies is to nurture the concepts under the radar long enough to make them compelling enough for the right people to get excited. Some parts of the executive team is open to partnering with "sister" companies, other parts are more reluctant. My approach is to win over the ones that are open to it to reach critical mass. I think that will lay the ground work for working with outside companies next. I am just starting to incubate some of the outside company opportunities, and I believe it will be a natural evolution from partnering with "sister" companies to partnering with thrid parties. At least that is my theory.

A couple of comments from the company persepctive. I have actually found that external collaborative innvoation can encourage a more open approach internally, rather than necessarily vice versa. I guess which way round this falls depends on company culture.

Starting with small specific 'open' projects – rather than going straight to a more generic 'platform' – can demonstrate the potential of the approach, and provides the 'green light' for exploring scale up.

Look forward enjoying more discussion on these pages!

As a platform doing OI in form of problem-solving competitions for companies, hypios.com indeed faces this difficulty. Here's what we believe is essential as seen from our "outside of the company perspective"
0. Identify a company that has enough internal resources for formalization and implementation of an OI challenge
1. Identify someone who already believes in OI within the company
2. Organize a meeting with him/her and make sure (s)he invites other people from his/her department (or on whatever level it is that problems that can be solved through OI occur) to explain what you offer. Explain why it's not a menace for internal R&D resources. Try to identify several test cases for OI with the people at the meeting.
3. Get the test problems solved
4. Build on the success story
5. help the company's internal communications explain your OI initiative and write the success story.