Open Innovation Happens Behind the Scenes

John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a great post recently named Open Innovation’s Next Challenge: Itself. It got scores of retweets so you have probably already read it if you follow the open innovation community. In short, they argue that companies need to focus more on relationships rather than transactions when it comes to open innovation.

The questions raised in their post are valid enough, but I think Hagel and Seely Brown – whom I respect a lot – are a bit late on this one. The companies that are serious about open innovation are already ahead of the transactional model. They fully understand that what really matters on open innovation happens “behind-the-scenes” rather than through fancy idea-generation or crowdsourcing initiatives.

“Behind-the-scenes” is not about making...

SAP: How To Build Eco-Systems For Open Innovation

I did some research on SAP and their open innovation-like initiatives. It was quite impressive and in particular I like their focus on building an eco-system through their collaborative websites.

In 2008, John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a great article on this. I have inserted some highlights from the article below, but you should read it in full and learn: How SAP Seeds Innovation.

Impressive Participation Consider some of the stats (2008, red.). More than 9,000 companies participate in SAP’s various partner networks globally, and 1.2 million individuals participate in SAP’s online communities. Roughly 25,000 new participants sign up for the latter each month, and from 2006 to 2007, its number of page views doubled, to more than 150 million. Participants contribute some 6,000 online posts...

Good reads on innovation #3

Here comes a list of reads, videos and podcasts on innovation that I have enjoyed and re-tweeted in the last couple of weeks. I hope you will enjoy this as well.

You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard 

Markets or Communities? The Best Ways to Manage Outside Innovation -  a must-read interview with Karim R. Lakhani

Winning The Contest Of Ideas – examples of cash prize contests to spur innovation from Netflix, X Prize and Cisco

How Does China Compare To Europe and US in Innovation? – podcast with Kevin Ryan

A Look Behind the Silver Lining – Boris Pluskowski’s honest and helpful review of The Silver Lining book by Scott Anthony

Buying, Not Making Innovation – good thoughts on Google by Joel West

Why Segway Failed To Reshape The World: Focused...