A Guiding Compass for Open Innovation

Mark Roser posted some good comments to my recent post: The Essential Element of Trust in Open Innovation.

Mark argues that “as open innovation matures, the open innovation community will collectively form a set of customs, norms, practices and perhaps even apprenticeships & licenses in order to enable large companies to engage with a new entity and know that their risks are being moderated.”

I fully agree. I believe that innovation as a management discipline will continue to mature and that we are getting better at detecting which processes will lead to which outcomes. Patterns are getting more visible and this can serve as a guiding compass to innovation leaders and their executives.

This discussion made me wonder which customs, norms, objectives and practices that are already widely accepted by the open innovation community today. My takes:

Become the preferred partner of choice. This objective is widely accepted. It can be used as a compass if we think of this as an end-game or key objective and then think backwards in order to construct ways to achieve this.

Bridge internal and external resources. Most companies have fully understood that open innovation is about bridging internal and external resources and to be able to identify and execute on the opportunities that arise on this.

Not all smart people have to work in your company. It has become a question of getting access to the right people rather than hiring all the right people.

Let us try to turn this up-side down. Which common understandings will solve many of the issues that companies are dealing with on open innovation? My takes:

Put processes and people before ideas. Companies have not yet understood this. Just look at the many poorly executed idea-generation portals. The internal platforms need to be in place before you begin soliciting ideas.

Develop a holistic approach towards innovation. Innovation is more than just products or technologies. Not everyone get this yet. Open innovation intermediaries such as InnoCentive and NineSigma help on this by advising companies to propose their issues as challenges rather than just helping them find a certain technology. General Mills focus on finding solutions; not technologies or ideas. This is a great approach.

Mindset matters most. Leading open innovation companies understand that open innovation is about creating a different mindset throughout their organization. Cisco is trying to move from a culture of competition to a culture of shared goals. This is by large driven by a desire to make innovation happen with external partners. P&G had to go from a “not-invented-here” culture to one where the mantra is “reapplied with pride”.

What can you add to this?