Rapid Incubation + Open Innovation = Power
Recently, I have read several interesting articles on how companies develop new projects based on rapid incubation or fast prototyping practices.
Anthony Townsend, Director of Technology Development at the Institute for the Future wrote about rapid incubation and lightweight innovation models in this article, Moving Beyond Open Innovation.
I agree with Townsend that the approaches he touches upon seem to work best for smaller web or software-based companies, but the potential is intriguing for almost any kind of company.
In the article, What Start-Ups Can Teach Big Companies, Steve Lohr looks into the concept of “lean start-ups”. He describes this as:
“The lean start-up model exploits the inexpensive, nimble technologies of open-source software and the Web to accelerate the pace of testing new ideas, finding customers and learning from mistakes, through constant trial and error.”
Companies will encounter many challenges in order to make these approaches work (Townsend lists several in his article), but the combination of rapid incubation / fast prototyping and open innovation can deliver results that makes it worthwhile looking further into this.
I believe there are serious advantages up for grabs for those companies that succeed with this. Thus, I will definitely follow this further and I would appreciate hearing about cases on this topic that could be worth writing about.
I like this thinking very much, but would challenge one aspect. To me, Rapid Incubation is simply the application of Open Innovation to earlier stage of the innovation process – often called Discovery, or the Fuzzy Front End. Open Innovation in that space looks very much like the Rapid Incubation that Townsend describes. Different – not because it's the "next step" in OI's evolution, but because idea building in Discovery with a network of partners (or even better, an external innovation community) is inherently different than idea fulfillment via OI when downstream in an innovation process. (n my opinion!)
I have not yet seen a comprehensive articulation of how OI plays in the full cycle – from initial trend work, to creating drill sites for consumer insights, to developing ideas, defining solutions to problems, then developing those solutions as products in a commercialization process…finally leading to launch. In my experience, the "look" of OI varies as it moves from upstream to downstream – not because OI is evolving, but because it has different value, tools and opportunity at each stage.
Irrespective of what you call this -rapid incubation, prototyping or by effectively designing a robust lighter-weight process to test quickly and refine this Lean front end concept for innovation is emerging as a trend, not only to reflect the economic times but also to defray some of the costs that the more comprehensive development paths take.
The top three obstacles mentioned by business from a recent BCG report on innovation are risk-adverse culture, lengthy development times and difficulty selecting the right ideas to commercialize. Achieving a lighter model for testing can lead to this more agile, lean and even user-driven organization orientation and move further to 'speed to market' as this still remains one of the top needs to achieve. It is well worth exploring and mapping out what needs to be in place to enable this to happen.
It will be interesting to see what emerges from this focus.
Hi Stefan, really interesting post. However, as same as Andy I keep seeing Rapid Incubation as one of the main advantages of applying an Open Innovation approach, not as something that happens separately.
I just finished reading a book written by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan, "The Game Changer," in that book you will find the importance of prototyping, doing pilots and involve consumers (or as they call them, "The Boss") in P&G. p.p. 193-211