What we are learning about open innovation
I recently stumbled across the openinnovators blog and was impressed with the information and resources on there. They were looking for guest bloggers to submit articles so I took the opportunity to summarise what we have been learning about open innovation through our experience in the past couple of years. The article, called 'the art and science of open innovation', is available to read here.
I believe that, whilst awareness in open innovation is increasing, the focus is still primarly around hard factors such as intellectual property
and investment models. Whilst we have learned a lot about these hard factors, and have a definite point of view about them, this article focusses mainly on the cultural factors/barriers to open innovation which I believe often get overlooked.
Anyway, as always, I'd be interested in any comments or feedback.
By Roland Harwood, Nov 13, 2008
I can’t help but think that if you have to spell it out like this for people, then they’re not real innovators.
Tina – you are right of course in that in many ways this is pretty obvious to innovators themselves. However there are various audiences for our work, and in the case of this article, its more focussed upon investors in innovation, whether that’s senior managers in corporates, academia or government, who may not have direct experience of taking a new idea to market. In that case, then I think there is value in ‘spelling it out’ as it were as there are common mistakes people make in trying to support or stimulate open innovation, which we are trying to address through our work.