Open Innovation Strategies for New Products, Services & Business Models

Building New Organizational Capabilities for Open Innovation

Many companies find it challenging to deliver truly breakthrough ideas. Fresh thinking is hard to come by if long-time staff continue to have the same conversations based on traditional wisdom and assumptions. Introducing fresh perspectives, knowledge and inspiration from the outside allows us to go beyond day-to-day thinking and opens up the mind to entirely new possibilities. Tapping into outside inspiration, technology, new capabilities and critical resources is a mandate in today’s networked world.

While many companies have historically looked to their own innovation efforts to drive growth, Open Innovation proponents argue that today’s business logic has changed and that companies today must embrace new strategies for systematically tapping into ideas, resources and knowledge from the outside. Relationships with external partners such as universities, academic research institutions, government or private labs and individual entrepreneurs can bring emerging technologies onto the radar screen or spur fresh insights that can be combined with internal competencies to create novel technology combinations that drive new products. And strategic collaborations and partnerships with other firms can instantly drive innovative new products, services and business models.

Open Innovation is as much a mindset as a process, and challenges an organization’s assumptions about the way innovation should be conducted. Below are some of the key differences between traditional approaches and the principles of Open Innovation:

  • The smart people in our field work for us
  • To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves
  • If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market first
  • The company who gets an innovation to market first will win
  • We should control out IP, so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas
  • We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company
  • External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value
  • We don’t have to originate the research in order to profit from it
  • If you make the best use of internal and external ideas, you will win
  • We should profit from other’s use of our IP, and we should buy other’s IP whenever it advances our own business model

Source: Henry Chesbrough, University of California at Berkeley

InnovationPoint helps companies tap into the power of open innovation. We leverage our expertise in the innovation process and incorporate the principles of open innovation to help you create breakthrough new products, services and business models that drive topline growth.