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The basic idea of “Open Innovation” is to encourage widespread participation to solve problems rapidly by collaborating and using Internet technologies. Traditionally business and government attempted to invent and innovate primarily by establishing planning, research and development projects within their organizations rather than collaborating with other organizations or connecting to citizen networks. Competition, not collaboration, was emphasized. The newer Open Innovation approach understands that an organization cannot rely entirely on its own internal efforts and that new technologies enable rapid exchanges of ideas between organizations and individuals. New ways of gathering information, recognizing excellent ideas and compensating problem-solvers are being created and are “democratizing” because opportunities to participate are open to everyone. Collaboration, not competition, is emphasized. The term “open innovation” was coined by Henry Chesbrough, (University of California/Berkeley) who writes extensively about the practices of large companies to innovate. Other key catalyst individuals offering definitions and practical methods are Erick von Hippel (MIT) with some very interesting things to say about practical methods that individuals, communities and firms can apply to improve their product and service processes, Frank Piller of the MIT Smart Customization Group is also interested in producer-user collaboration and Venture2 CEO Mike Doherty uses a blog to discuss how to create and manage external innovation networks. Here are a few introductory links: Henry Chesbrough Once an organization or individual is open to suggestions from “everybody” the need is to know how to compensate those whose ideas do solve a problem. There have been many experiments by both public and private organizations to establish incentives for working collaboratively on problem solving. Two techniques, “online marketplaces” and “award-prize systems” are now quite well developed. Blogs have been especially helpful to individuals seeking collaboration. InnoCentive is a good example of the “marketplace” approach. InnoCentive registers “seekers” and “solvers” to facilitate satisfactory agreements. (InnoCentive http://www.innocentive.com) An article on Wikipedia, based on figures from Mohan Sawhney, reports that as of 2008 InnoCentive had 64 “seekers” including Procter & Gamble, Dow AgroSciences and Eli Lilly that had posted more than 800 “challenges” in 40 disciplines including chemistry, life sciences, business, computer science and clean technology. Of these more than 348 had been solved by over 165,000 “solvers.” The Rockefeller Foundation provides assistance to InnoCentive to seek solutions that are pro-poor. The InnoCentive/Rockefeller Foundation challenges have, for example, looked for an affordable solar powered device to prevent and/or limit the spread of malaria and safe and dry-based latrines for rural schools in Africa. A recent example of the award-prize approach is the DARPA Network Challenge (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that encouraged more than 4,000 groups to register in a competition for a prize of $40,000. The challenge was to find ten large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the U.S. A team from MIT won within nine hours of the launch of the balloons. The MIT team explained that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to report about the locations and this worked amazingly quickly. https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx Individuals are frequently using blogs to share solve problems. Eric von Hippel mentions the example of Saul Griffith, an MIT PhD student at the time, with a long-time interest in kite-surfing and kite development. He started a blog and posted patterns for kites he designed adding helpful hints and tools for kite construction and use. Others, many with top-level technical skills, joined and the effort grew to exceed that of equipment manufacturers in terms of designs posted on the site for free downloading. Griffith now has several inventions to his credit. Here are a few opportunities for more background information on Open Innovation.: The Next Wave of Open Innovation an article in Business Week To finish, I suggest you make a New Year's Resolution to find a way to collaborate on line during 2010. I, for example, am resolved to start a small publishing operation this year for educational materials. Any suggestions will be gratefully received via rumicuna2@yahoo.com and I will share with you what I learn in the process of setting up the organization. |