Simply put, open innovation involves accessing and exchanging knowledge between people in your organization and people working externally. The goal is to support innovation by generating new, high-quality ideas that can help create a long-term competitive advantage in the market. For an established company, it can be implemented by collaborating with individual people, other organizations, suppliers, and even startups. The flexibility of how open innovation is pursued truly makes it a one-size-fits-most strategy! Do you agree? Please let us know your opinion in the comments. 

Why Pursue Open Innovation? 

Companies choose to engage in open innovation because of the various opportunities for growth, learning, ideas, and other benefits of increasing innovation activities. Also, mitigating the risk of innovation is one reason companies pursue open innovation. If the market is involved in the innovation process, achieving idea validation then ensures that a new innovation will be accepted by its market. Below are some of the key advantages: 

Speed Up the Innovation Lifecycle 

Applying open innovation as a strategy to developing a new product can speed up the time from conceptualization to commercialization. When a company introduces the necessary external experiences into the innovation process, this combination of resources and knowledge together leads to a faster innovation lifecycle. For a product-oriented company, speed-to-market is crucial for success, so it can be a great fit for this type of firm.  

(1) Gain New Knowledge 

Open innovation is centered around gaining access to new knowledge, which can be accomplished by partnering with external organizations or individuals with a specialized skill-set. By applying new knowledge to a company’s project (or product or problem), the introduction of new ideas and perspectives can lead to new value creation and innovation. As a side benefit, access to new knowledge and learning opportunities can help employees evolve their careers in your company. 

In the Deep Innovation Design methodology, the ideation process involves an analogous search in which innovation participants compare unrelated (but similar) industries, companies, or sectors in order to derive inspiration by translating the understanding into their own company’s dynamic. Analogous search can also be accomplished through open innovation by incorporating unrelated (but similar!) partners, suppliers, or organizations into a company’s innovation process. The introduction of a radically different way of accomplishing a task or workflow could lead to successful innovation! To learn more about Deep Innovation Design, you can check out this TED Talk or read more in this blog post. 

(2) Benefit from the Customer Experience

Collaborating with selected customers (i.e., highly engaged users) is an effective way to generate new insights about customers’ usage of your products, services, and/or perspectives on your competition. Interacting with highly involved customers opens the doors to innovative ideas. These individuals likely have experience-based opinions around your company’s current offerings or other ideas on how to improve. Including customers in your innovation or ideation process increases the likelihood to compose and capture original ideas. Since an idea is a composition of past experiences according to recent discoveries in neuroscience, involving the experiences of the end-user can augment the ingenuity of the innovation team. Customer interaction through open innovation can lead to differentiating your company further from the competition, save time, and mitigate risk. 

Are you interested in more resources? We welcome you to explore our upcoming webinar: The Strategic Value of Open Innovation on March 11, 2021. 

(3) Risks to Pursuing Open Innovation 

Of course, it is important to mention the potential hazards of engaging in open innovation. Some companies may choose to avoid openness in their approach to innovating in order to eliminate the risk of revealing company know-how with external parties. As such, vetting potential partners, vendors, and collaborators is important before exposing internal processes and practices! However, the benefits and possibilities produced by open innovation significantly outweigh the risk of sharing too much information. 

Thank you for reading! What do you think are the pros and cons of implementing open innovation? Please share your ideas in the comments below. 

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100 Million Innovation Managers

Of course, at first sight, it sounds ridiculous. Yet if you take the number of registered businesses around the world plus the enormous growth rate of new businesses it is relatively easy to imagine that 25% of those companies, no matter how small they are, will want at least one person that works on innovation concepts. The fortune 20,000 however, is more like hiring Millions on their own. Of course, there is room to debate the number in both directions. If we consider a 3% investment in innovation, the numbers could also move further up. Who would have thought just 10 years ago that in 2020 we will have 1.5 Billion websites live? And an estimated 100 Million webmasters are handling them.

Gameover for romantic ideation dreams

Now, since we know how the brain is actually composing, processing, and fine-tuning ideas, we can begin strategic innovation management. We know that no idea ever composed was by accident. We know that brainstorming can’t create a single disruptive business model. We know that disruptive innovation takes on average 6 weeks to create. It will not happen in a week nor will it take longer than 12 weeks. With amazing predictability comes manageability but most importantly readiness to invest. Constructing an innovative idea is no longer much different from architecting a new skyscraper. Both have a predictable outcome. All that is opening up new investments. 100 Million Innovation managers become more and more a realistic number.

Now is a good time to build up your experience.

BlueCallom launches its Innovations Management Academy with an orientation webinar on Jan 7 and Jan 18. https://dev.bluecallom.com/certified-innovation-manager-orientation/ We will help innovators, managers, and executives to get their arms around the many counter-intuitive aspects of an innovation lifecycle. It’s already hard enough to find top talents. And that will get even harder in the next few years. Having experience will remain to be a top value in an innovation career. “How many innovation projects did you complete?” “What methods did you use?”. To compete with 100 Million others for a job is equally challenging as trying to get top talents competing with 100 Million other businesses. We interviewed shrimp farm owners in Vietnam, street dealers in Cambodia, car repair shops in Nigeria, and 50+ more businesses. The owners are on average 25, graduated from their local University, and are smart enough to understand that our world is changing very fast. The shrimp farmer considers an AI system to manage the population, the car repair shop an e-commerce system for parts sale, and the street dealer a mobile app to push their daily harvest of ultra-fresh food to sell it the same day. Each one of the innovative concepts is simple at first glance, yet powerful enough to force all their competitors to follow.

Starting January 25, the new BlueCallom Innovations Management Academy will offer four major programs:

Deep Innovation Design Champion – learning all about the methodology
Deep Innovation Design Specialist – applying the acquired knowledge in a project
Innovation Manager – learning to run a full-size innovation project
Innovation Executive – knowing what you can expect from your team

You will find all details here: https://dev.bluecallom.com/imacad/

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