Open Innovation Characteristics: What Can You Add?

I really enjoyed facilitating a great think tank session together with Greg Fox, Cisco and Andrea Meyer, WorkingKnowledge at the Open Innovation Summit.

Our think tank participants were a nice, diverse group as you can see in the attached presentation. Open Innovation Summit Think Tank

Our objectives were as below:

• What are the top 3 characteristics that define an open innovation leader?

• Which companies come to mind as open innovation leaders?

We started out by developing this list of open innovation characteristics:

• Risk

• Proactively seek others virtually and IRL

• Opposite of “not invented here” & feeling comfortable with that

• Leveraging (external) others

• Adaptability / courage

• Collaborate to compete

• Customer-focused approach (focus on needs, both known & unknown)

• Persistence/ perseverance

• Communication

• Vision

We chose these as the top three characteristics:

• Adaptability (exemplified by the courage to manage risk, constant experimentation & evolution)

• Communication (holistic: internal & external, consistent behavior & messages, deliberate strategy, top-down modeling, confidence to share what you know)

• Vision (establish clear sense of why we are doing open innovation, set context for open innovation, create a sense of urgency)

These are just our recommendations. It would be great to hear your reflections. What kind of characteristics can you add? Which companies do you believe have these characteristics? You can see the companies we liked in the presentation.

Join the discussion…