One of the most common questions we hear from current and prospective clients is, what do you think about open innovation? We get really excited about this one cause it’s a “fun and loaded” question. The reason being, there’s a lot of hype around open innovation and all the “amazing things” that you can do with it. But like with everything else, there are a set of steps to being able to implement open innovation successfully.
First and foremost, before you can do open innovation, you need to have your general innovation house in order. You must be able to take in new ideas; you have to be able to figure out which of those ideas are the most relevant for you and for your customers. You need to figure out how to implement those ideas and turn them around and create the most value that you can, out of the small-scale experiments that you run, in the quickest amount of time possible. These kinds of things are no small task, whether you’re doing open innovation, or standard innovation. So before you can start talking about open innovation, you got to get those basics down. On top of that, there is a ton of confusion around the term “open innovation”.
What do folks consider to be open innovation?
Outside of innovating, “open innovation” starts with the dialogue, right? It’s about finding a group of people to be able to tell you what they think would bring them value, or what they think would bring value to others (or at least that’s the hope). So a lot of times, people have this thought that of literally everyone in the world, providing feedback on a product or a service or something that’s going to bring value to absolutely everyone and as a result you’re just gonna take over the world with this new product or this new service. And that’s the grandiose vision of open innovation that a lot of people have in their minds. And really, it starts much much smaller than that.
Should YOU Use an Open Innovation Model?
“Open Innovation” should start, first and foremost with customers. How are you reaching out to them? And how are you talking to your customers so that you’re getting feedback from them and either
- making improvements on your current products
- creating new products or services
- or creating stuff that fits their needs?
How are you reaching out to non-customers to get their feedback?
- Why aren’t they a customer?
- What things could you do to bring them value with your solutions?
- Could you augment something?
- Could you improve something?
- Could you add a new widget or feature?
How are you keeping customers and non-customers engaged and excited to provide the kind of answers and insights that you seek?
These are some of the foundational components for an open innovation system.
Once you master those and really build your chops around the fundamentals, the next phase is about how you grow that network. How do you get more people involved? How do you build upon ideas once they are submitted? How do you keep people informed and up to date on progress? Keep in mind that you may not have to answer these kinds of questions alone.
This is where a lot of people get caught up. At this point, you can explore working with partners, trade associations, you can work with competitors, you can work with people outside of your industry, you can work with whoever; to make use of their networks, their people, to use your networks, your people and to build out and really get people captivated about the kind of thing that you’re trying to do and the kinds of services that you’re trying to create. And really start to get different groups of people involved and engage. You can use idea management tools like IdeaScale or QualityBridge To make something like this happen requires a totally different set of strategies. Not your normal or typical “building a product or building a service”. To do this part involves networking, marketing, sales, strategic integration and having it work together with the plan that you want to create, from an innovation perspective. Now you’re starting to put the framework in place for an open innovation system.