23/02/2022
Five essential tips to implementing an open innovation approach in your organization.
Open innovation is a successful way of increasing the innovativeness and effectiveness of an organization, it has been shown to reduce cost and time to market. So why aren’t you benefiting from open innovation?
Open innovation enables an organization to integrate external knowledge and ideas in order to co-create products or services, commercialise existing technologies or improve competencies in new markets.Open Innovation Approach.
Get clear about your objectives for open innovation.
If you want to increase efficiency within your operation, then outsource part of your development to external partners and focus on your core competencies. But if you want to increase innovation you should start engaging with customers, startups or partners from other industries.
Link those objectives with your corporatestrategy.
If you have a defender’s strategy; for example, being cost leader or niche market leader then you should invest in customer and supplier integration activities as they will support your corporate strategy.
However, with a prospector’s strategy such as being a technology leader, you should invest in a wide range of different activities with partners such as research institutes, startups or cross-industry organizations.
Balance open and closed activities according to your strategy and culture.
If you are a defender, then invest up to 20% of your internal resources (money, people, attention etc.) Towards open innovation activities. For a prospector’s strategy, you should invest up to 80% for open innovation.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Both figures above assume that your culture is open enough to allow for external activities and integration of external knowledge without the ‘not-invented-here syndrome where employees sabotage external knowledge.
Select the right people in your organization.
Not every employee is equally skilled and happy to engage with outside people, ideas and knowledge. Search for people that believe that open innovation is an approach that strengthens the expertise of their own team – instead of competing with them.