Reflections on Intellectual Property and Open Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

Intellectual property rights used to be the key topic at open innovation conferences a few years back. Although still an important topic, this is no longer the case as companies mature on open innovation and find ways to solve these issues.

This development led me to downplay the significance of IPR when it comes to open innovation. Maybe I went a bit too far on this. I am reflecting on this after a session in my Danish network group in which we had a great visit by Jørn Vestergaard-Jensen, a Danish lawyer with good insights on IPR issues for open innovation.

Here I share some of the insights gained and reflections made by myself and the other participants.

Business before legal

I was...

How to Use Social Media for Innovation – 11 Great Reads

by Stefan Lindegaard

As I researching for my next book, which focuses on the intersection of open innovation and social media, I want to share some of blog posts and articles that I find interesting.

There were many good insights and I have inserted snippets for each read to give you an idea on what to expect. I am sure you can find lots of inspiration here!

Please leave a comment if you can share other good reads or cases!

Is Social Media Really Collaboration in Disguise?

“The best and deepest results are yielded if collaborations hover at about 150, with an upper max of about 230. Why? If team size gets larger than this upper bound, “you don’t have enough work in common,” and the group fails...

Vestas: A Case Study on Social Media Use for Innovation Efforts

by Stefan Lindegaard

This is the first in a series of short case studies in which I look at how global companies use social media tools and services for their (open) innovation efforts. These are quick-and-dirty case studies, but I do hope they can start discussions and perhaps inspire others on the use of social media tools and services for innovation.

The first company is Vestas Wind Systems, a Danish manufacturer, seller, installer, and servicer of wind turbines. It is the largest in the world, but due to very rapid growth of its competitors, its market share decreased from 28% in 2007 to 12.5% in 2009. The company employs more than 20,000 people globally. You can read further on Wikipedia.

Social media tools and services overview:

There...

Using Social Media to Connect the Dots: BASF, PepsiCo and Telefonica/O2

by Stefan Lindegaard

I argue that the knowledge and input needed to make innovation happen is already available. Much resides within the corporate walls and even more can be found externally.

If we accept this, the key challenge is to know what you are looking for and once this is known another key challenge is to connect the dots. The first challenge relates to strategy and processes. This is difficult. The second challenge – connecting the dots – is also difficult, but we are now seeing how social media tools and services help make this happen.

Some examples:

Yammer has become a strong idea platform for many companies that engage employees in ideation and idea development. This is to a high degree led by Yammer’s ability to connect...

Dealing with Unfit Ideas and Zombie Projects

by Stefan Lindegaard

Most corporate innovation units deal with “zombie” projects. Those are the projects that are killed by managers or executives because they do not match the strategy, do not hold enough potential – or more likely – do not have the right timing.

Such projects are often kept alive to some extent by employees who then end up wasting valuable resources on projects that only rarely are brought back into the innovation project pool. A key reason for this could be that that managers or executives do not like to have their decisions second-guessed and thus their willingness to look at “older” projects is low.

In an earlier blog post, 7 Challenges for Corporate Innovation Units, I argued that the window of opportunity gets...

Lego’s $50 Million Open Innovation Failure

by Stefan Lindegaard

The headline screams like a disaster. It’s not really that bad. Yes, Lego took a loss around that size when they decided to shut down their online game, Lego Universe, but they also learned some valuable lessons.

Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, did a story on the closing of Lego Universe, a so-called Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). It was a good article with interesting comments from Lego executives that were useful to extract some lessons on (open) innovation that go beyond Lego.

Lego admits they did things wrong with Lego Universe. A big mistake was that they required people to buy a DVD in a store before they could start playing the online game. The reason for this was that extensive research had...

A New Front End of Innovation?

by Stefan Lindegaard

The front end of innovation process has always been “fuzzy”. There are no clear definitions and more often than not corporate innovation units work hard to improve this important phase of innovation as they are not fully satisfied with their current processes.

Right now, there is so much change going on that impacts the design and implementation of front end of innovation processes. Specifically, I see three things that have a significant impact. They are:

External contributions: Open innovation and crowd-sourcing initiatives bring more diversity and opportunities to an innovation process. This is a good thing, but be careful as this also makes the innovation process much more complex. If this is not addressed in the very early stages it will have a significant, negative...

The Intersection of Yammer and Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

This is a guest post by Colin Crabtree, Account Manager at the IT company Gijima. Colin has been in the IT industry for over 30 years in various positions and is currently involved in a number of initiatives at Gijima to promote and support innovation in the workspace.

Background

I work for Gijima (Pty) Ltd. a large IT company in Johannesburg South Africa. About a year ago, the company realized for a number of market related reasons that it needed to shake itself down and redefine where it wanted to be in 2025 in order to remain relevant and one of the leaders in the South African and a player in the Global IT market. Thus was borne its client centricity...