Open Innovation: Don’t Mess Up Like Intuit!
The innovation self-confidence at Intuit seems to be pretty high judging by this press release: The 30-year-old Startup: How Intuit’s Innovation Engine Thrives.
Here you get a short introduction to the innovation successes at Intuit and we are also told that Intuit’s approach to innovation has two core competencies that differentiate the company from its competition. They are:
• Customer-driven innovation, which is a mindset and methodology to uncover important, unsolved problems.
• Design for Delight, a process that helps create better ways to deliver what’s most important to customers. This approach to innovation creates an entrepreneurial environment where small teams collaborate to delight customers and deliver awesome product experiences.
Nothing wrong with this. Not at all. You can also read about a related, interesting initiative at Intuit in this blog post by Andrea Meyer: Intuit’s High-Velocity Experiments
A few years ago, Intuit also believed in open innovation. They had one of their best open innovation initiatives I have seen with Intuit Collaboratory, a platform in which Intuit boldly states that “this could be the start of a beautiful partnership.”
In 2011, they actually delivered on this as they had great people developing the open innovation mindset and processes as well as top executives backing this up. But hey, we are in 2013 today. Take another look at Intuit Collaboratory.
Did you notice the dates on the site? Nothing has really happened since 2011. Come on!
Either you shut down an initiative like this or you invest in it. Right now, Intuit just looks like a laughing stock and although this can bring out some smiles at some people, this also serves as an open innovation warning.
This is not how you become the preferred partner of choice within your innovation ecosystems.
Hi Stefan, do you have any insight into what has changed at Intuit to lead to this "un-dead" status of their open innovation thrust?
Yes, I got the below reply from Intuit:
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Stefan – you are right that the Collaboratory site hasn’t been updated. We plan to take the site down (and have meant to before now.) The directed or centralized approach to open innovation that Collaboratory represents is just not as relevant to where we are currently in our innovation journey.
Open innovation is alive and well at Intuit. We highly value the collaborating we do with universities, technology partners, suppliers, customers, visionaries and others who challenge us to be our best. What we’ve learned along our journey is that our various teams have made open innovation a more integral part of how they work. And they have expressed that the results are more effective when they lead the projects. With this open innovation leadership taking place across the organization, we no longer needed the more centralized or directed approach of the Collaboratory site.
We can share more insights with you if you’d like. We have some of the latest news about our culture of innovation and some of the current things we have in the works (many of which reflect our strong innovation ecosystem) highlighted on the Intuit Network.
Hugh Molotsi, VP, Technology Innovation, Intuit
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It sounds like they are moving toward the next-generation of open innovation in which is is more embedded in the overall innovation process. That is a good thing. I hope I get to interact with them to better understand this.
Hi Tom, I do not have a clear understanding, but I think it boils down to lack of top-level support. It was definitely there in the early stages, but if it was still there, they would give the leader(s) of the initiative the necessary resources to make this happen.
Is it possible to find evidence concerning the commercialisation of the contributions from the winners of the two challenges on Intuit Collaboratory? I believe the crowdsourcing model has yet to prove itself when contributions are technologically complex and have to be matched with internal R&D. I know it's a fun tool for generating brand slogans and ideas for new flavours etc. But is an initiative like Intuit Collaboratory really worth the investment with a substantial transaction cost of posting challenges, evaluating submissions and actually integrating solutions with internal R&D?
I have no insight into the Intuit open innovation but I did hear a presentation by the Open Innovation folks at Cisco and Dell a few years ago and it basically boiled down to they choked on all the ideas. Both Dell and Cisco were inundated with ideas and it took an immense amount of time and resources to figure out what to pursue. I am not sure what ultimately happened at Dell and Cisco but while the spun it such that this was a great thing, reading between the lines it was way more than they bargained for and had go into a maintenance mode. Perhaps Intuit is likewise in the "maintenance" mode. But one would think they would communicate back to the world and let people know how it is going.
Hi Rob, you hit on an important point here. Big companies always have plenty of ideas whether they come from internal or external sources. They key challenges is to set up a process that identifies and develops the best ideas that fit into the overall strategy. Having this in place will make open innovation much easier.
I agree with that… just wrote up a piece called, "Ideation is Easy. Conversion is the Hard Stuff." that explains this point with some data from the latest Booz & Company survey on R&D.
http://www.wellspringworldwide.com/blog/ideation-…
Hi Stefan …
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In 2011, they actually delivered on this as they had great people developing the open innovation mindset and processes as well as top executives backing this up.
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May it have been that in 2011 it appeared as they they had top exec backing, but in reality maybe this backing was not quite to firm?