The Open Innovation Navigator enables you to explore proven open innovation techniques and processes. By acknowledging your degree of openness and identifying the maturity of your innovation you can select methods that are appropriate for your organisation and for your target audience, both now and in the future.
"If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try."
Seth Godin
When it comes to open innovation, knowing where to start or what to do next can often be the hardest decision. This uncertainty leads to inaction and missed opportunities. To counter this, we have produced a simple tool, based on our range of practical experience, to show the most common and relevant methods to successfully innovate openly. The Open Innovation Navigator is structured such that different open innovation methods are positioned according to their openness and to the innovation maturity that matches our strategic objectives.
Using the Open Innovation Navigator you’ll create two paths. Mark the first path with an X to show what you are doing now. Mark the second path with an O to show what you could be doing now.
Degree of Openness
First, ask yourselves, how open are you? There are varying degrees of openness that are relevant and helpful depending on your sector and circumstances:
Cooperative – You want to break down internal silos and connect and empower employees to contribute to innovation
Collaborative – You want to source external ideas, talent and technology to solve known challenges or enhance existing capability
Co-creative – You want to share internal ideas, talent and technology to tackle as yet unknown opportunities and create new capabilities
Maturity of Innovation
Next, ask yourselves what stage of the innovation process you are at. The three stages are broken down as follows:
Explore – To listen to and engage with others to find new insights, and to use these insights to identify and address new and unmet needs
Extract – To collaborate with others to build on unmet needs, to develop new ideas, and to test and prototype potential solutions
Exploit – To incorporate lessons learned from prototyping solutions, and to develop and implement robust business plans and investable propositions together
Depending on how open you consider yourselves to be, and what stage of maturity your innovation is at, you will have created a path through the Open Innovation Navigator and identified an open innovation method you could be using right now.
Next, you navigate through the tool one last time, asking yourselves the same questions but this time answering from the perspective of where you aspire to be. Mark this route with an O. This will identify an open innovation method you should be using next.
HOW THIS TOOL FITS IN WITH OTHERS
Invite colleagues to take the Open Organisation Test to help you gauge our organisation’s readiness for open innovation.
Create an Open Innovation Manifesto to determine your innovation strategy.
Explore Open Innovation Models that might underpin different methods.
Colleague Crowd is a 100%Open Service that fits in the Explore/Cooperative box. It is an employee-based programme consisting of an online platform and offline events to share ideas and develop insights into new innovation requirements.
100%Open’s Social Listening service, used to observe external conversations, also fits in the Explore/Cooperative box.
Open Innovation Challenges (Explore/Collaborative) can be designed using the Crowdsourcing Platform and the Challenge Designer.
An Open Innovation Ecosystem (Extract/Co-creative) can be designed using the Network Builder tool.
See this 100%Open blog to read examples of how 100%Open have applied each open innovation method in practice.
