Open Innovation in Italy – As Bad as It Gets?
First, I have to confess that I am a bit skeptical towards Italian business and innovation capabilities beyond high-end clothing and accessories due to several disappointments in the past.
It does not help when I look into Telecom Italia and their initiatives on (open) innovation.
My first encounter was @NextInnovation, a Twitter account for Next Open Innovation, an open innovation initiative by Telecom Italia. I like to see corporate Twitter accounts and especially when they focus on innovation. Unfortunately, there has been no updates on @NextInnovation since Nov 18 despite the account has gathered a fairly respectable number of 741 followers.
Since the telecom industry is as international as it is, I am also surprised that this open innovation initiative is in Italian language only. Perhaps they believe there is enough value to extract in the Italian innovation community or perhaps there are some language issues involved? Nevertheless, I think you need to have an international approach to open innovation in almost any industry and this requires a site in English.
When you look at the innovation section at the corporate website, you also have a hard time taking Telecom Italia serious as an innovation partner. Most of the “latest” updates are months or even years old and there are several broken links.
I often talk about that companies need to look good – and perform well – as they compete for the best innovation partners. Telecom Italia does not look good at all. It is just plain awful.
Actually, I would really appreciate some good Italian examples on (open) innovation so I can get a better perspective on the innovation capabilities in Italy. Let me know if you can help.
Dear Stefan,
first of all i agree with you that this initiative from Telecom Italia looks more to me like an attempt from the communication department than a genuine open innovation programme run by the Innovation or R&D departments.
When it comes to Open Innovation programmes i consider more as role models the BlueVia programme from Telefonica https://bluevia.com/en/ or the way AT&T is managing the developer ecosystem as shown by their recent announcement at the CES : http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=22234&c…
To come back to Italy with an exemple of Open Innovation, i am quite impressed by the move into Open Data from the ENEL group which created an Open Data portal :http://data.enel.com/en . A good example of what we at bluenove believe more and more corporations wil do as described in our White Paper free to download for free: http://www.bluenove.com/en/publications-en/news/p…
Best
Martin
Hi Martin, thanks for your comments and for sharing the links!
I liked some comments posted by Chris Ransford in a LinkedIn group as they raise other topics. Here are his comments. See my response below:
"I don't know if you can judge like that Stefan.
I know very innovative entities who do not believe in, nor use, Twitter, and I'm not sure we can fault them. Is there anywhere statistics, or even anecdotal evidence, documenting the usefulness or contributiveness of Twitter towards real-life, material innovation?
Moreover, as far as large Companies go, I find that many of them have evolved into a kind of 'half open Innovation' approach, on grounds that we can really understand.
This 'half open' innovation is in essence OI that only takes place within a wide but closed circle of contributors. From my observation, this has evolved from the rather poor quality of OI ideas coming from beyond the boundaries of the closed circle – poor quality that nevertheless required and used resources to sift through and assess, all for very little return – in other words, a bad allocation of innovation resources.
So it just maybe that Telecom Italia et al. are using different OI channels that are not obvious to the public, nor wide open to rank outsiders, and there may be quite valid reasons for them to do so.
I would be wary of such blanket judgments."
MY RESPONSE:
Chris, blank judgements often spur good discussions
The thing that annoys me with Telecom Italia is that they seem to do things half-way, half-baked. I cite several eye-raisers in my blog post and together they seem to form a pattern that can / will hurt the innovation image of Telecom Italia. I don't think they or any other company can afford this in this new era of open innovation and thus I think the post serves a good point in making people consider this. I will elaborate further in an upcoming blog post.
Dear Stefan, please note that Next Innovation is a project that started some years ago. You are right, the website is still working with a very small staff, maybe they don't actualize very often their twitter account but the point is that in the meantime a lot of things happened in Telecom Italia. Please check http://www.telecomitaliahub.it/#!/ and you'll get a more realistic landscape of Telecom Italia presence in the web. There's a lot more to say but it's happening inside Telecom Italia: from Bar Camps to crowdsourcing to the twitter account of Marco Patuano, i can testify that Telecom Italia is learning how to listen
Hi Marco, glad to hear that other, good things are happening. Hopefully, Telecom Italia will clean up their small mishaps to create a picture that better reflects their efforts. Stefan