10 Open Innovation Questions for SME’s
As a follow-up to my slightly provocative blog post, Why Open Innovation is Not for Small Companies, I have begun looking further into the interesting topic on how small companies can innovate with others.
I plan to interview several small companies and I am working on a set of questions for this. You can see the first 10 questions below. What do you think of them? Can you add others that can help highlight the real issues on this topic?
Why should small companies embrace open innovation?
What does open innovation mean to small companies? How does this differ from how big companies view open innovation?
What are the benefits of innovating together with others for small companies?
What concerns should small companies have about open innovation?
How can small companies prepare themselves for open innovation?
Which business functions should “own” open innovation at small companies?
What kind of people should work with open innovation at small companies?
Open innovation is very much about ecosystems with several partners. Small companies often take the back seat in such setups. Is this a problem? Are there things small companies can do to level the playing field in such relationships?
Small companies often have limited legal resources. What can they do to get better deals and protect their intellectual property?
Are there myths about open innovation and working with big companies that small companies should realize aren’t true?
Your input is highly appreciated…
To start of with question 1: I believe that small companies will be able to face competition (and of course aiming to get closer to customer insights) when they start embracing Open Innovation. Helping out each other on aspects like R&D, market research and production will save space and resources and thus costs.
Stefan, i suppose to know SMEs (Small and medium enterprises) a bit. Those answers come from my experience and I hope they could help you.
1) Why should small companies embrace OI?
Because they often have not strength enough to get the IP and to defend it on international bases
2) Ho they differ form large ones about OI?
They differ since they never was able to innovate using the mainstream model to innvoate:
(internal) research>product development>new products>turnover from innovation
They rather innvoate using the day by day activities. Their strength is in the closeness with the customer and the low numebr of hierarcical levels inside of the company
3) What are the benefits to embrace OI?
Cause they have not other chances. Also because they often innovate (maybe just incremental innovation) looking at what other similar are doing and doing it again hopefully better. Maybe this is not OI (rather crowdsourcing Innovation?), though
it is more similar to OI than the traditional innovation.
4) What concern about OI?
They are scared by the idea other can learn they secrets. Actually it just a mental barrier up to me. The real concern could rather be the lack of time and to consider OI just a fashion
5) How to prepare them?
Introducing some first level knowledges, usually named 'managerial competencies'. It is impossible to introduce higher ideas when you are talking to an enterpreneur working 95% of his time on a machinery. So, up to me not all smal companies are at the same level and you need to choose the ones that did some step before. Small companies have a big pro: luckily they are many, so you can choose the ready ones!
6) Which business functions should own the OI? and 7) What kind of people?
As I said before there are small companies where there are not functions at all, but just the enterpreneur and othe 5/6 people working on the workshop. In this case you need to start to talk to the enterpreneur. When the company has done some steps you always need the owner endorsment, but you can start to talk to some second generation fellow. It is not so relevant what they are doing in the company, but that they are close to the enterprenesur and that they have the languages to understand what OI is talking about
Small companies should connect themselves in network or clusters before to face OI. That would allow them to dedicate to OI specific resources. This is one of the step they should do before I mentioned before. Bad luck, connect them in clusters is often very hard to my experience.
9) legal IP?
Probably the cluster is a solution for this issue too. Or external services at a cheap rate. Up to my experience it is very hard to find them and also because of that smal companies should look at OI
10) Myths not true for larger, SME should know?
I don't know enough about this myths to answer. What I know is that there are a lot of myths about small companies untrue for all of them. As I mentioned before, around the world there are a lot of small companies unready for OI. Much lesser are the ones ready. Nevertheless those 'much lesser' are a huge number!
Hi Stefan!
Good questions!
I think some of them should include the negative. For example: "Why they think the company shouldn't embrace open innovation" or something similar.
Here I leave some more for possible redrafting:
-How to integrate or combine open innovation in existing "innovation"?
-What kind of partners should seek? How to select?
-What business dimension they seek to achieve?
-How large is the will to share and collaborate?
-What investments in training and culture are willing to do?
-What are the nuclear powers that need to develop?
My two cents
Jose Baldaia
Hi Stefan – I suggest starting with the definition of OI, to test how wide the understanding of OI actually is in SMEs.
It would be interesting to find out if people in SMEs are dedicated to OI or do it "part time". If they do it part time, are they rewarded for OI or for their "day job"?
Finally, on the myths question, it's worth presenting a list to them and asking them to agree/disagree. You may remember I did a blog post on the subject.
Will you blog the results?
Kevin
Hi all,
I really appreciate your input on this. There are several things that provide inspiration for my upcoming interviews as well as future blog posts.
@Kevin, can you share a link for the blog post? This might also be relevant for other readers.
I hope that you will comment on my future blog posts on this topic. Please also let me know if you have ideas for other views to be discussed.
Hi Stefan – the link is innovationfixer.com/webblog/?p=49
Hi Stefan:
All good and appropriate questions. I wonder how size impacts deal structures? I would imagine that it could have a pretty significant impact.
Best regards,
Michael