How to Advance Your Innovation Career

by Stefan Lindegaard

What can you do to advance your innovation career in times like this? Let me present some ideas and hopefully you can add more advice on this in the following discussion.

• Align With Executives. You need to have a better alignment between the innovation strategy and the overall corporate strategy. One way to do this is to make an extra effort of understanding what matters most for the executives right now and deliver on this.
• See What Comes Next. Once you deliver what the executives would like to see right now, you still have to be able to see what comes next and make sure that your company moves in that direction . The small wins gained by aligning with the executives hopefully make them more attentive to your suggestions on how to develop strategies on what comes next.
• Go External, Get Connected. As we move towards open innovation, you need to build better personal as well as corporate networks. Look at the external sources you need to connect with in order to develop the offerings of your company and expand your own career opportunities.
• Become A Digerati. As you work to develop more external ties, you need to gain a better understanding of social tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps even Facebook. Facebook has a more private focus but there are industries where you need to understand how Facebook works in order to innovate better. Use these tools to gather and distribute information and knowledge and to build your personal brand if you have set a strategy for this.
• Build Your T-Shape. In short, the T-shape is about having depth as well as breadth. You need to understand how other business functions work and why they are important to the innovation process. One way to do this is to convince your executives that job rotation programs are great vehicles for building a better overall understanding of your company and its offerings.
• Get Noticed. In times like this, you need to make sure you get the proper credit for the work you do. I am not saying that you should just focus on your personal brand and disregard the work of colleagues. Find the right balance remembering that no one likes shameless self-promotion.
• Adjust Your Drive. Working with innovation you most likely have a faster drive and pace of change than that of your colleagues. You need to be careful about launching too many initiatives and pushing too hard as you need to get the support from others to get results. From time to time, you need to stop, look around and ask yourself if you have enough key stakeholders backing your projects.
• Are You A Future Executive? A majority of the innovation leaders I work with aspire to climb the corporate ladder and even become executives. In this case, you not only need to understand other business functions; you need to work in other functions such as sales in order to get the management experience needed to advance to higher positions. One reason is that innovation is carried out in smaller units not giving you the experience of working in – or leading – a larger department.
• I have only heard of a few cases in which innovation leaders advanced directly to executive positions; you need to build further on your resume and especially with sales responsibilities. Perhaps this is the time to develop new skills and competences by taking on new challenges?

Just some thoughts… I look forward to hearing your comments.

Five Ways To Get Smarter On Open Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

I believe the best way to get smarter and acquire new knowledge on innovation is through articles and blog posts rather than reading books. It is just my experience that it works better both in terms of value and time spent.

Let’s say you want to learn about open innovation. I would advice you to follow these five steps in order to understand what open innovation is and decide whether it is relevant for your situation.

1. Get TweetDeck which is a Twitter application that helps you stay in touch with what is happening right now. Use the search function and enter the keywords you want to follow – in this case open innovation and perhaps also words such as crowd-sourcing or co-creation. This will give you plenty of leads on blog posts, articles and other insights worth reading.

2. Your LinkedIn profile is an important part of your digital footprint. Besides telling others who you are, you can also join groups such as Open Innovation And Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation Discussion Group or my own group Leadership+Innovation. The quality of the discussions varies, but it is getting better. You can also use the search tool to identify people working on issues relevant to your situation.

3. Check out conferences and events on open innovation. The next one is CoDev 2010. You can attend and get insights through (hopefully) good presentations, but more importantly you can network and connect with the open innovation community. You can also check the speakers and bloggers of these conferences in order to identity the key influencers in the open innovation community. Don’t be afraid to contact them directly.

4. At this stage, you have identified bloggers you want to follow. A content aggregator tool such as Bloglines.com makes it easier to follow many blogs. Check it out. However, I have experienced that TweetDeck works so well that I no longer have a need for such tools. This will probably also happen to you.

5. This post is actually a sidetrack from a discussion on whether business people still have the time and need for reading books. Too many books are unfortunately not worth the read. Many books seem to be care more about the ego of an author or the wallet of a publisher rather than focusing on the needs of the reader.

Books – the good ones – still have a role to play, but this is not where you should start. Do the other things first and then read the books of authors that you believe can deliver value for the time you plan to spend reading and thinking about it.

Let me hear your comments on this. Perhaps you can also share how your tips on getting smarter and acquiring new knowledge and insights.

Defining User-Driven And Open Innovation – And The Role Of Consultants

by Stefan Lindegaard

User-driven and open innovation mean different things to many people. So how should consultants guide their clients on this?

This became one of the key issues in a discussion that followed my Why User-Driven Innovation Should Not Be Confused With Open Innovation post.

I argued that these two types of innovation are related, but not the same. I also argued that open innovation and user-driven innovation already have too many different meanings and definitions making it useless for academics and consultants to drive ONE definition for these terms.

As a comment to this, Ellen Di Resta suggested that we should “view user-innovation and open innovation as approaches. Thinking of it that way, then it’s the application of an approach that needs to be tailored to each specific context.”

Ellen also mentioned that the terms can be ambiguous, and asked whether this might not be the point as it keeps us from being boxed too narrowly into a corner when we may need our tools to be flexible enough to handle a broad range of challenges.

I fully agree with Ellen when she argued “that consultants should take a more practical approach on this and help their clients define innovation towards their situation.”

Rikard Wærø agreed as well, but he brought in some perspective on this by stating that “the customer is right, we just need to help them understand where they are acting wrong. The theoretical work behind open innovation and user-driven innovation can help us lead them in the right directions, but the correction should not be communicated to them in a language they may misinterpret.”

Jeff Murphy, a corporate guy from J&J had this statement: “I prefer to view open innovation as a broad enough term that also includes what you have referred to as “user-driven innovation.” Different than above, but then he also mentioned that “…rather than getting tangled in semantics, and see it as more productive for an organization to select and use the right types of open innovation – those that are best aligned with their organization’s specific needs, objectives, and business/technical complexity.”

Looking at the bigger picture, I think we are pretty aligned on this. What do you think? And how do you see the role of consultants when it comes to making open innovation happen?

By the way, Graham Horton noted that open innovation is a two-way process which allows both inbound and outbound movement during all stages of the innovation process. He has mentioned this earlier to me and he is of course right.

However, I believe companies have plenty of challenges just making the inbound process work and they need to focus on this. As they get the proper mindset and processes in place, then they can start looking into the outbound processes in which they out-license or sell technologies, ideas or intellectual property not being used internally. But focus is important in order to get it right in the first place.

Open Innovation And Intrapreneurship For Small And Medium Sized Companies

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have been asked to present my views on how small and medium-sized companies can move to the next level by implementing open innovation and intrapreneurship.

I am still working on the presentation, but below you can see some bullet-points I plan to include in the 3 hour-long session. What do you think? Am I missing something important?

Besides hearing your comments here, it would be great to get out and share this with other companies, organizations and event organizers around the world. Let me know if you would like to discuss this

• The challenge. Growing a startup is very much about executing on a great product, idea or technology. However, as the company grows focus tend to shift towards control rather than keeping the visionary thinking and bold approaches that build the company. This must be re-ignited. Understanding open innovation and intrapreneurship can help do this.

• All the best people do not work here. One key reason for Procter & Gamble to initiate open innovation programs was that they learned that for each of their 7,500 R&D people there were 200 people outside the company with equal skills and competences. An ignorant – and arrogant – company would ignore these 1,500,000 million people arguing they do not matter as they do not work for us. P&G did not ignore this. They understood they should connect their own organization with the best and brightest from the outside world. Given the size of smaller companies, this mindset becomes even more important.

• People matter more than ideas. Innovation is not only about finding the right idea or developing a great technology. A company must also be able to identify and develop the right people who can be matched with these ideas at the right time.

• Innovation is about more than just products. Check the Ten Types of Innovation framework developed by Doblin. It is a great tool to broaden people’s mind on innovation.

• Think in terms of eco-systems. Today, one company does not compete against another company. Eco-systems compete against other eco-systems. Check this article by Hagel / Seely Brown to learn more: How SAP Seeds Innovation.

• Control or contribution? Big corporations can split their open innovation efforts on projects in which they are either are in control or just contributes with IPR or other resources. Smaller companies should only get involved in projects where they are in control or where their contribution is important and valued. The project should also fit the overall strategy of the smaller company.

• Big corporations can drain a smaller company. Signs of this include long planning periods, difficulties in identifying and working with the right people and too much time spent on patent lawyers too early in the process. If these tell-tale signs appear, a smaller company need to evaluate whether this will become a drain of valuable resources that could be better spend elsewhere.

• Where to look versus how to be found. Smaller companies need to be more active looking around whereas big corporation can focus more on being found and becoming a preferred partner of choice. Companies can look for projects and partners in their own networks (such as customers, suppliers and partners) or in external networks (such as universities, intermediaries and consultants).

• Is the company ready for open innovation? Any company must ask themselves why open innovation is relevant to them, how it should be defined to their situation, how it links with the overall strategy and how it can be implemented. Smaller companies must also prepare the organization for a cultural change, develop and implement a networking strategy and train their employees on innovation, stakeholder management and how to work with external partners.

• Open innovation is about communication. Companies must understand the importance of communicating internally as well as externally. New social media tools such as Twitter (search and share information) and LinkedIn (identify the right people, search and share information) must be understood and leveraged.

I am looking forward to your comments.

Is Open Innovation On Its Way Down?

by Stefan Lindegaard

Last week, I had a meeting with a high-level and very capable business person. She was wondering whether we have gone through a hype cycle on open innovation and now sees a downturn.

Too many companies started open innovation initiatives and they are now getting disillusioned as the results lack. Boeing was quoted as an example. They got into open innovation as part of their supply chain efforts related to building the 787 Dreamliner. Boeing have big problems on this and Boeing has retrenched a bit on their openness.

I do not think open innovation is on the way down. On the contrary, there is lots of potential to be unleashed. Of course, Boeing needs to rethink their strategies when the product is more than two years late. To some extent Boeing made some of the same mistakes I see many other companies do when it comes to open innovation.

Two questions for you: What is the below? What is wrong?

• Implementation
• Strategy
• Definition
• Why

You probably already have the answers. This is how many companies approach open innovation. They just jump into it believing open innovation can solve many of their innovation issues. Of course, this is not the case making the approach wrong.

You need to turn this upside down. First ask why your company should even get engaged with open innovation, next define open innovation in a way that fits your company, then make open innovation a part of – not the main – innovation strategy which again should reflect the corporate strategy and then you can plan your first steps and begin the implementation.

Must Read: Great Report on Open Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

The University of Cambridge just released a report which is the product of two years of research within the Cambridge Open Innovation Network. It provides an overview of existing approaches to open innovation and outlines how a company can start to implement a strategy to match the organization’s needs.

The content focuses on:

• What does open innovation mean?

• Enablers and obstacles to open innovation

• How to build an open innovation culture

• How to acquire open innovation skills

• How to motivate employees

• How does this all fit together? A framework

I have skimmed it and it looks great. This is a must read for me in the coming days. It should be for you as well if you are serious about open innovation.

Download: How to implement open innovation

Nokia And Open Innovation: A Good Match?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have always respected Nokia which I consider to be a quite innovative company. Lately, I have been wondering how they approach open innovation so I did some research on their activities.

First, let’s take a look at how Nokia defined open innovation in a presentation given by Kari-Pekka Estola, VP, Nokia Research Center in 2007.

“The sourcing, integration, and development of product and business system innovations through win-win external partnerships to capture maximum commercial value for R&D investment.”

Kari-Pekka Estola also argued that open innovation is a critical trend and not yet another management fad due to these reasons:

• Innovation happens in smaller companies, global innovation hotspots and increasingly influential user communities.

• Several factors such as workforce mobility and venture capital are eroding the ability of corporate research labs to contain their useful knowledge.

• A new breed of independent research labs create a new source of R&D development.

• “Innomediaries” – innovation intermediaries – are enabling an increasingly active and distributed market for ideas.

As it shows, Nokia had a pretty good understanding of open innovation early on. They also execute fairly well. Let’s take a look at their many open innovation-like initiatives:

Nokia Research Center is the hub of their open innovation efforts. It is very much focused on selective and deep research collaborations with world-leading institutions.

Open Threads is a newsletter by Nokia Research Center on open innovation. In the latest issue 2/09, the Nokia IPR team began a series of articles aimed at clarifying the basics of IPR and explaining how open innovation collaborators can engage with Nokia. Worth checking out!

Forum Nokia exists to serve everyone who is interested in the creation, testing, or business of mobile applications, content, or services. Forum Nokia provides several entry points for companies interested in developing new offerings with Nokia or towards to the mobile community.

Symbian. Last year, Nokia bought Symbian and then gave away the software code to the non-profit Symbian Foundation. In Why Nokia Bought Symbian, Then Gave It Away, Scott Anthony of Innosight, presents some good views on why this happened.

The Maemo platform. Dutch innovation consultants, Fronteer, recently mentioned that they will help Nokia on their work with Maemo which is an open source software platform with over 16.000 members. Fronteer mentions that Nokia in previous projects developed ideas and concepts with a selected group of lead-users and experts in a co-creation sessions. This time, they will take it a step further: they will share their ideas and concepts with the complete Maemo Community, both online and off-line, to collaboratively develop new Maemo concepts.

Although, I think Nokia overall does quite well there are a couple of issues that I would like to learn more about.

• External contributions in the later stages of their innovation process. Their open innovation initiatives primarily focus on technology and the early phases of generating new product and service offerings. Open innovation should include key external contributions in all phases of the innovation process; not just in the technology or idea development phases. I had difficulties finding information on how or if Nokia does this.

• Beyond technology. Nokia has a Corporate Business Development unit that looks for breakthrough ideas that are ‘industry shakers’ – innovative business concepts and technologies – that integrate with and expand beyond Nokia core business.

Having validated new opportunities with sound business cases, Corporate Business Development further develop them as new business programs within Nokia or collaborate with companies to establish licensing deals, joint ventures, acquisitions, or partnership agreements. It sounds interesting. However, I have difficulties finding information on how this unit defines and approaches open innovation and how they work together with Nokia Research Center on open innovation. Maybe they don’t?

Nokia definitely appears as a technology-focused company and Nokia Research Center is all about research collaborations with world-leading institutions. Perhaps there could be a stronger link to the business community?

Nokia might already be doing the things I would like to learn more about. Hopefully, I will soon get the chance to discuss this with innovation leaders at Nokia. Until then, it would be great to hear your input and comments on this.

Are Engineers Really That Good For Innovation?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.

In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.

Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:

“Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not so obvious with other professions. Engineers are prone to share, to seek out other engineers when they face a mental block.”

Wow! Are good engineers by necessity innovative? My response is whether you really can be innovative when the next sentence mentions this is not so obvious with other professions. This is borderline arrogance and to some extent hubris.

In today’s innovation environment, I believe you need a T-shape in which you bring strong depth to the table. Engineers often do this, but to me this is worthless unless you also have an understanding and empathy for how other business functions and competences work and add value to the products and services to be created.

You could also raise the question whether the limited thinking displayed in the comment is not exactly the reason that have caused so many products to be brought to market that were filled with all sorts of doodads and capabilities that the engineers thought were just fantastic, but that real consumers had no use for. I think it is fair to say that how this guy defines innovation is skewed toward the ability to solve technical challenges, which is only part of innovation.

The second comment went like this: “The natural place for open innovation to start is in the technical function, in my view because it can be neatly defined and encapsulated without excessive risk.”

What is actually being said here is that open innovation should be defined from an engineer’s perspective. Hmm, I would argue that we should define and embrace innovation from the customer’s and/or end-user’s perspective as they will end up paying for what we do. It is important we understand this and it is my experience that engineers as a profession often do not get this. Other professions and business functions better understand this making them just as important and valuable – if not more – in the innovation process.

Engineers, of course most of you are good for innovation. You should be proud of what you bring to the table, but you also need to wake up. The way we innovate is changing fast and engineers need to adapt to this just as everyone else. This is especially true as we open up our innovation processes to external partners rather than doing almost everything internally.

Perhaps you should try one simple approach next time you face a mental block; seek out non-engineers. This might broaden your horizon which I am sure will benefit all of us.

I look forward to your comments on this.

A Presentation On Identifying And Developing Innovation Leaders And Intrapreneurs

by Stefan Lindegaard

Last week, I held a 3 hour corporate session giving my input on how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation and some thoughts on the current innovation environment.

It was a great session with lots of discussion and interactions. This is what I like although it means we did not get through all of the below topics that I would have liked to discuss with this great group. The topics were:

• business plan competitions
• idea management
• corporate antibodies
• traits and skills needed for the future
• why networking matters
• open innovation
• the broken model of innovation
• career development for innovation leaders and intrapreneurs

Take a look at the presentation and let me know if you like to discuss some of these topics here on the blog or in real life. PRESENTATION

Steps for Implementing Open Innovation: Recommendations from Our Community

by Stefan Lindegaard

You are the innovation leader in your company. You want to implement open innovation. Which actions should you take and in which order? What are your key barriers?

I posted these questions through LinkedIn groups a couple of months ago. Maarten Meijer, Amanda Heath, Gordon McLeod, Lee Sellenraad and others helped with feedback that I have incorporated in this blog post. Thanks for your help, guys!

We all seemed to agree that top management involvement is important. I have often said that you need to align your innovation strategy with the overall corporate strategy. This is also a great way to involve top management in your innovation efforts. This also applies when you work to implement open innovation into your strategies. Perhaps even more as open innovation can really threaten the power base of managers making this a corporate culture issue.

This brings us to the next issue; getting the middle management into the loop. Middle managers have their own agendas to develop as well as their own powerbase to protect. They may see open innovation as an opportunity or as a threat. You need to understand the value of proper stakeholder management to win middle managers over to your side as the help and support they can give makes it more likely that open innovation actually will succeed. I have written a couple of earlier blog posts that get into this. TBX: An Approach To Developing The Innovation Culture and Can You Manage Your Stakeholders?

During the discussion, it was said that “…there is not much change of success if open innovation is not embraced, articulated and driven from the top down.” As mentioned above, I believe that top management involvement is needed, but open innovation does not necessarily have to be driven top down.

Most companies already have small pockets of successful open innovation and if the innovation leader can make these visible, a movement can also tickle up from the bottom making top management see the value in opening up to external partners. In general, this game is very much about getting the small wins that convinces the sceptics to continue down an unknown path.

So as you implement your plan, start with simpler initiatives to build trust, results and demonstrate outcomes that contribute to top line growth and bottom line profitability. With success you can refine your plan and transition to more complex issues.

This suggestion came from Lee Sellenraad, who also argued that innovation leaders should track the progress and establish baseline measurements for everything you do. It is always difficult to define measurements, but some ideas include core values desired, portfolio and project progress and comparison with generally acknowledged corporate and industry benchmarks. Try to quantify results so you can substantiate the value of your innovations.

Amanda Heath suggested these somewhat simplified actions:

1. Decide which areas you want to innovate in and articulate your needs as simply as possible.

2. Based on 1, work out (brainstorm) your innovation sources – from close in to you (suppliers, customers..) to far away from you (possibly most fruitful)

3. Devise your two-way communication pathways to your sources and how you will handle the ideas/technology/innovation when they arrive. In particular, pay attention to legal implications and intellectual property ownership.

4. Communicate your needs to your sources.

Besides the barriers already mentioned, Amada also advices us to pay attention to the resources required to do it effectively, the internal “not invented here” syndrome and how to find the right communication pathways to your target sources.

I also liked some suggestions by Gordon McLeod, who said that you should not just rely on internal innovation staff or a single department. You can use wikis and other social media tools to invite collaboration and contributions from the rest of the company and the entire external world. He also recommended defining carefully and publicly what you want to create, what you’ll do with the work of the collaborators (social innovation vs. profit), and how they’ll be credited (rewarded).

Gordon also urges innovation leaders to understand (and accept) that the work will be driven more by the needs/wants of the contributors and not necessarily by the original vision from your company. As Gordon puts it “What you originally wanted might not be what you eventually get – it’ll probably be better!”

You can read more about things to consider on approaching and implementing open innovation in this blog post: Approaching Open Innovation: Lessons From P&G

I enjoy such interactions with others although I have to say that I often lack the time to engage with you as much as I would like to. I try my best and please know that I really appreciate your input : – )