Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) has produced a new guide to show how other companies can follow in their footsteps.
The report, “How to Implement Open Innovation”, is the result of a two-year study of some of the world’s leading firms and can be downloaded from the IfM's website.
The research team looked at more than 30 major companies from a variety of sectors, including energy, aerospace and defence, software and media, electronics and telecommunications.
It is thought that open innovation could be a way of improving a firm’s ability to create and capture value, by improving the rate and quality of innovation.
Rather than relying on internal resources firms share knowledge and technologies with other companies in a bid to create new commercial opportunities
Report co-author Dr Letizia Mortara, of the IfM’s Centre for Technology Management (CTM), described its purpose: “While Open Innovation is a relatively new phenomenon, it has started to gain traction in businesses across a range of sectors. We wanted to try and find out if there was a framework or guide for other firms to implement Open Innovation and to understand what people involved in its adoption did on a day-to-day basis.
“Philips is a good illustration of OI implementation; it created incubation processes to carry out research into ideas which do not immediately fit within existing businesses, but in time could lead to the introduction of new products.
“But Philips is not the only firm to embrace OI, and others have adopted interesting approaches. Our study provides an overview of a range of current practice and illustrates the challenges firms may face when attempting to implement OI.”
Fellow author Dr Tim Minshall, a senior lecturer at CTM, said: “Open Innovation has already shown it can help firms cope with emerging challenges and create new opportunities
“While not a panacea to all business problems, it can be a positive process. We think the report offers an overview of existing approaches to OI and an outline of how to implement it and some of the main obstacles that need to be overcome.”
Among the guidance contained within the report is how companies can build an open innovation culture, how to develop the necessary skills within the business and how to motivate employees.
Dr Minshall added: “While each company will face different challenges and will have different reasons for pursuing open innovation, the report offers a framework which can be tailored to their needs.”
The report was written by Dr Mortara, Dr Minshall, and Johann Napp of the IfM and Imke Slacik now of McKinsey and Co.
I found your report thanks to Franz Dill's blog -- http://eponymouspickle.blogspot.com
ReplyDeleteI should first briefly introduce myself as having managed a very busy consultancy, followed by a decade of running a pioneering private incubator, a venture capital firm, and inventor and founder of Kyield -- which is a semantic enterprise system that is focused among other things on unleashing innovation in large organizations.
In our incubator we created two related market leaders, and very much embraced the open innovation philosophy -- one for small business, and another for thought leaders in the world's largest companies, think tanks, universities, and governments.
I will not spend time here on what your report contained- a great deal of value, but rather the essential elements I found missing-- the latter is a better use of our time.
Who wouldn't want to collaborate openly with the world's leading innovators? The question is what incentive do the world's leading innovators have in working with those who dominate markets... particularly with essentially zero protection for contributions in the digital work place environment. In our incubator, that we often joked was the Parc of the Internet era-- we were directly and indirectly responsible for billions of dollars of benefits to the members, rich content and ideas (not just from us, but the members) that helped make careers in editors and professors and CEOs in our most prestigious universities.... never to even be cited. They would simply just copy the work and implement in markets they dominated. And we paid for the opportunity -- they wouldn't even cover the cost of the bandwidth voluntarily....
You do mention rewarding behavior that embraces the philosophy -- where we started in the mid 1990s -- however accountability, economic justice, motivation, creating an environment to enhance creativity, protecting IP -- particularly the individual, and managing the quality and quantity of information consumption... were all significant barriers in our work.
Just part of the many problems we face is that those who control proprietary standards in this medium, and the desktops in large organizations, apparently believe that it's not in their strategic interest to protect the IP of everyone else (except their own products of course), simply because like so many markets dominated today they benefit from the free ideas and even formal IP of others, with a very strong case history now that simply directly contradicts the open innovation concept.
These are complex, very difficult issues to overcome -- I believe we've succeeded. I invite you to read our very popular paper Unleash the Innovation Within for more information on our work.
http://www.kyield.com/images/Unleash_the_Innovation_Within_-_A_Kyield_White_Paper.pdf
Thanks again for making the report available. I do hope your interests were aligned well with the good of the overall markets and economy, and that your incentives are sufficient to continue to do so.
Kind regards,
Mark Montgomery
Founder
Kyield