Insights and Perspectives on Open Innovation
I attended the Open for Business conference by NESTA in London yesterday. It was a great conference with a mix of panels, case studies and networking. My own active role was to facilitate a panel featuring Steve Shapiro, VP, InnoCentive and Helmut Traitler, VP – Innovation Partnerships, Nestlé. Great people!
The conference gave me some good reflections on open innovation that I would like to share with you.
Challenges and solutions. We need to focus more on challenges and solutions when we engage with open innovation. How can we better bridge internal and external resources to solve our challenges and solutions? This also highlights the important skill of being able to define what we are actually looking for. Both Shapiro and Traitler made good points on this.
Reach beyond the usual suspects. NESTA Chairman, John Chisholm urges us to reach beyond the usual suspects on innovation and he believes open innovation can help us do this. I think he is right. This is also an important driver for Helmut’s work at Nestlé. You can get an idea of his work in this interview by Bruce Nussbaum.
View open innovation as a parallel process. We are used to view innovation as an iterative process. With open innovation, it is becoming a “massively parallel process where failures and successes happen at the same time” as suggested by Alph Bingham in this blog post from Shapiro: Why Edison Was Wrong
Cheryl Perkins, the founder of Innovationedge – as always – had some comments worth considering. One is that we need to remember the intangibles when judging open innovation programs. Too often, we get caught up in the things we can measure and we forget that the intangibles can be just as important. I also agree with Cheryl’s view that successful companies focus on market driven rather than technology driven innovation.
I also spoke with a participant whom I know from his previous job. He is a great guy and very knowledgeable about open innovation. He said that in his leadership position in his new company they have developed open innovation processes and initiatives that work so well that he does not want to share them with others.
Since we still need to improve on open innovation in general, I really hope everyone will share great insights. This was unfortunately not the case here.
However, I fully understand his rationale which is also a great sign that open innovation is not only maturing, but also working. What better argument than gaining competitive advantages can we have for implementing open innovation?
Stefan,
Responding to your final comment about a participant known to you that does not want to share the processes and initiatives that work well with others is a great shame.
I'm not sure I fully understand his rationale and if I may suggest where you have in the past been clear in raising issues with the stragglers and sometimes their clumsy attempts in the open innovation space with helpful observations and suggestions, I think the opposite should also happen- where there is something good it should be shared and you should be encouraging him to open up a little himself.
Stefan,
I did not attend but watched the videos on the NESTA website. Interesting event and lots of interesting stuff on this area.It was a UK audience.
I enjoyed the session that you chaired. I was struck by the question about the difference between the US and the UK and Steve's observation. Paraphrased, the US doesn’t talk about open innovation as such they just do it whereas in the UK we have lots of people with the job title "Open Innovation Manager". That struck a chord with me and my experience.
NESTA are doing a great job in trying to develop the right thinking in the UK in this area but I feel that a key issue is overlooked and not addressed. Before you can run you have to be able to walk.
What was not addressed in the conference is the sad fact that very many UK companies simply do not do any innovation at all so what is there to be open about? The Open Innovation movement needs to address that conundrum first in my view if we are to see open innovation having a major impact within the UK.
Nick, unfortunately the problem you raise is not just a UK thing. It goes for almost every country and thus level the playing field in some sense. There is still a lot of work to do on innovation – open or not.