Open Innovation Perspectives for Executives, Innovation Leaders and Employees

by Stefan Lindegaard

As I prepare for a couple of workshops in the coming weeks, I have the opportunity to think about how to prepare different messages for three different groups of stakeholders within a company; executives, innovation leaders and other employees working with innovation.

Here comes a few notes on each of these stakeholder groups.

Executives: First, they need to understand what open innovation is and they also need to understand that a true implementation of open innovation will bring change across the entire organization. They need to lead this change.

Executives need to be convinced by example. I plan to look into key questions such as: How do other companies approach open innovation? What can we learn from this? What were the benefits? How did they...

Open Innovation in Big Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline Leads the Pack

by Stefan Lindegaard

What are the big pharma companies doing on open innovation and external collaboration? Do they have specific point of entry platforms/portals for external collaboration in the pharma industry? Other initiatives?

I did a quick and dirty survey on the 10 largest pharma companies by revenue (Source: Wikipedia).

I looked at their point of entry platforms/portals for open innovation or external collaboration – if they had any, the number of Google hits related to open innovation and the number of current employees having open innovation in their titles.

This is what I found (companies are listed in order of revenue):

1. Johnson & Johnson

Point of entry: Did not find any. Standard R&D site.
Google hits (J&J, open innovation): 19,800
Number...

An Open Innovation Manager’s Perspective

by Stefan Lindegaard

Written by Craig Cmehil, who works as an open innovation manager at SAP.

A couple of weeks ago I asked the question in the community, “What is Open Innovation?”, now I want to talk a bit about what I think Open Innovation is to me.

I received a few comments when I posted that blog and I’m hoping to address at least one of those comments in this post, however the other two comments I’m going to save for another post. The comment I’m hoping to address in this post was from, Vijay Vijayasankar,

After racking my brain on this – I found no good definition that made sense to me. So I am very eagerly waiting to find out...

How to Measure Open Innovation Value – Part 2

Written by David Simoes-Brown and Roland Harwood from 100% Open – an open innovation agency spun out of NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Link to How To Measure Open Innovation Value – Part 1

What’s Different about Open Innovation?

Better Value

The metrics are less developed in this emerging discipline than in traditional innovation. In my last blog  I outlined a list of the sorts of direct and indirect measures that firms can use to capture all the value that innovation brings. This same list holds true for open innovation. You will want to profit from collaborations and there will still be the usual associated costs. Given the motivations to collaborate (better innovations delivered cheaper and faster)...

Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing in Asia

by Stefan Lindegaard

What are Asian companies doing about open innovation and crowdsourcing? I have been thinking about this as preparation for a session next week in Beijing.

First, let us look at a couple of cases.

I recently wrote about how LG has launched Collaborate & Innovate as a vehicle for initiating and developing relationships with global partners who have great ideas and technologies. Nice initiative!

YTL Communications, a telco in Malaysia runs a 4G innovation network intended for third party developers. As a part of this, they have a myPrize challenge in which they will award a total of USD 1,000,000 to help entrepreneurs and innovators realise their best ideas and to help them commercialise these innovations to customers on a nationwide level using...

InnoCentive Builds Communities

by Stefan Lindegaard

In a recent post, Crowdsourcing Meets Communities, I raised the issue whether companies can benefit from including indirect benefits such as community based learning in their crowdsourcing initiatives.

InnoCentive, one of the leading open innovation intermediaries seems to be thinking along these lines as they have launched a new home page and introduced the Solver Discussion Forum.

The idea of the forum is to create a place where solvers can connect with each others, learn more about InnoCentive and to exchange information and insights on open innovation.

Sofar there is not much activity in the forum, but I like the initiative and will back later this year. It will also be interesting to see how/if other companies, intermediaries and service...

How Understanding Customer Jobs turns Crowdsourcing into Smartsourcing

by Stefan Lindegaard

Written by Graham Hill, who works with customer relationship management, customer experience management, customer-centricity and customer-driven innovation. You can learn more about Graham and his work here: Strategyn

Peter Drucker the gurus’ guru famously said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Marketing is hard enough to get right, but innovation is a whole lot harder still. Depending on the industry, about 80% of new products fail on introduction in the market. And up to 60% fail in reintroduction.

To overcome this disastrous failure rate, companies have started to recruit customers to generate ideas for new products. A process Jeff...

10 Good Reads on Innovation #15

by Stefan Lindegaard

Here comes a list of 10 reads on innovation that I have enjoyed this week. I hope you will enjoy this as well. You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard

How Understanding Customer Jobs turns Crowdsourcing into Smartsourcing by Graham Hill http://bit.ly/jBpAN

Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation In Crowdsourcing Platforms http://bit.ly/dqClKf

Creating a Culture of Innovation by Esther Dyson http://bit.ly/cKnXSf

Voice of the Emergent Customer by Drew Boyd http://tinyurl.com/y9l7p4o

Authority Comes From Failure by Glen Stansberry http://tinyurl.com/ybdjxvx

Key to Successful Innovation Leadership? by Paul Sloane http://bit.ly/aEppRD

Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It by Bruce Nussbaum http://bit.ly/dyLUmZ

Idea Cancer – The Danger of Good Ideas by Jeff Lindsay http://tinyurl.com/yax85tm...

Call for Visionaries! Help Make the Future of Innovation Open and Global

by Stefan Lindegaard

UPDATE: Join our LinkedIn group if you want to join this initiative and become a 15inno regional ambassador. The link is: 15inno Regional Chapters

Can you imagine a global network of people who believe the future of innovation is open and global?

Can you imagine a global network based on regional chapters that helps increase the general awareness of open innovation and connects the people and companies – virtually and physically – that turn open innovation into reality?

This is my vision for 15inno and I am looking for great people who can relate to this and help turn it into a reality.

Do you want to get involved? Read further and find out if we should discuss ways of working together in...

Crowdsourcing Meets Communities: New Approach for Companies?

by Stefan Lindegaard

InnoCentive, Netflix Prize and Style Your Smart are just a few examples of crowdsourcing initiatives that pay cash prizes for selected or winning contributions. This seems to work just fine although you always have to find the right balance on what to offer for contributions. Some competitions only use very small cash prizes or just gifts such as iPods or clothing.

One example is the Tomorrow’s Urban Mobility Services contest held by the BMW Group. Here the prizes are not that great, but perhaps they believe that big, cash prizes will just attract many junk ideas. Perhaps they believe that quality input comes from people who care more about kudos and recognition than big cash rewards?

Personally, I think...