I have the pleasure of moderating a session on open innovation together with Chris Thoen and Jeff Bellairs at the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston, May 3-5

Chris is Managing Director at the global Connect & Develop office at Procter & Gamble and Jeff is Sr. Director, Open Innovation at General Mills. They are some of the most experienced open innovation practitioners you can find so I look forward to a great session. You should join us : – )

At the session, we will look into issues on which Chris and Jeff have lots of experience as well as ideas on how to improve. Besides a talk on how to approach open innovation, we will look into how to change the culture. Chris and Jeff gave some early advice on this:

• Think of driving culture change over a period of years versus weeks or months.
• Leverage the work of others and learn from their mistakes.
• Create some early wins and figure out how to infect your organization with the open innovation virus.
• Set up your culture for “proudly found elsewhere and re-applied with pride versus “not invented here”

We will also get into the next practices of open innovation. For Chris and Jeff, this is about reducing the “noise” and dead-ends and finding new tools and capabilities that allow them to identify and effectively connect with the right resources as rapidly as possible.

On next practices, Chris and Jeff are also looking for answers to questions such as how to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds, what is next in the hyper-social innovation and to deal with IP in these circumstances.

I am sure this will be a great session and I hope we get to see you there…