Open source Innovation 07-004

Open source Innovation

In an old post last year I contended that social innovations really drive and maximize technology innovations. Open source innovation is one of those social inventions thats only really came on the scene in the last 3-5 years.

I remember....It wasn't so long ago, 10 -15 years ago that inventors, entrepreneurs, SME innovators and startups with a cool new incrementally better or totally disruptive technology would come knocking on the doors of blue chip corporations only to be faced with rude refusals to meet, returned unopened proposals, refusals to sign NDA's and generally what I called the "corporate cold shoulder" to any new outside ideas or technology innovations.

The not-invented-here philosophy and protect that status quo was dominant in the minds of most Fortune 500 firms.

That's now slowly changing -the corporate world is gradually opening up to outside suggestions, alliances and partnerships. Because of rising R&D costs and decreased product revenues (due to shorter product life cycles) — companies are finding it increasingly difficult to justify investments in stand-alone, in-house innovation.

Here's some more weak signals to support this notion.

Top tier business magazines are addressing the issue -as in the most recent MIT Sloan Management Review and in-sourcing of external technologies a hot topic at many business and strategy conferences and symposia.

In  MIT Sloan Management Review we see:

"In most organizations, no single person short of the CEO (and maybe the VP of Strategy) bears responsibility for the business model. Line managers take the model for granted, and so they miss opportunities to reduce the cost of innovation, (spot pending threats and opportunities) and create new revenue streams."

In the new issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, you'll find three case studies of companies that successfully opened up their business models to leverage more new  ideas and capture greater value from their existing  assets.

I also got a call for papers (CfP) for the European Academy of Management today to submit a paper to their Open Innovation track.

In part the invitation says:

We are organizing a track on Open Innovation at the EURAM 2007 conference (to be held in Paris from May 16 to 19, 2007) and we would like to invite you to submit a paper.

The Open Innovation track aims to attract papers that stimulate the ongoing debate on open innovation and advance our understanding of open innovation
as a field of research. Submissions are invited from both practitioners and management researchers and they may be purely theoretical or based on
empirical research.

Julian Birkinshaw (London Business School) will give a keynote speech on "Open Innovation and in-sourcing of external technologies".

© 2005-2007

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

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