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Why Now Is the Time for “Open Innovation” - Coggle Diagram
Why Now Is the Time for “Open Innovation”
Amid the sadness and ruin of the first months of the Covid-19 crisis, something surprisingly began to happen: Companies began to come together to work openly at an unprecedented level, putting the ability to create value before the opportunity to make money.
Collaboration can obviously save human lives, but it can also produce huge benefits for companies — even though it's often overlooked in normal circumstances.
For more than a decade, we have studied open innovation and have taught thousands of executives and students to innovate in a more distributed, decentralized and participatory way.
At many companies this kind of distributed, decentralized, and participatory way of innovating remains an ambition that hasn't yet come true.
Open innovation has the potential to expand the space for value creation - it enables many more ways to create value, whether through new partners with complementary skills or by unlocking hidden potential in lasting relationships.
Open innovation can help organizations find new ways to solve urgent problems while building a positive reputation. Most importantly, it can serve as a basis for future collaboration.
While concerns over intellectual property, return on investments, and various unforeseen consequences of open innovation are all valid, what we are experiencing now is an opportunity to innovate through and beyond the crisis.
Earlier research has found that many companies are extremely worried about value “leaking” from collaborations with outsiders
These intellectual property concerns are of course real and important, but they risk blocking any open innovation initiative from gaining momentum.
Smart companies take a leap of faith, collaborating on important stuff, without risking negative exposure.
Companies often find that they depend on the voluntary and active participation of employees and partners to be successful: traditional means of command and control have little reach.
Instead companies need to rely on a combination of hard and soft incentives to motivate internal and external collaborators. Companies need to identify — and respond to — their partners’ true motivation.
Aligning all of these motivations with what companies wish to achieve takes effort, curiosity and a portion of humbleness.
it pays to put the work in ahead of time to discover, and potentially push, partner motivation.
New partners always entail costs in terms of search, validation, and compliance, as well as the forming of new social relationships between people.
A crisis can prompt companies to explore a greater number and even new kinds of partners.
Preserving some of that open-minded attitude towards new partners after the crisis can help companies stay on top of innovation
These initiatives are often the tip of the iceberg, and successful open innovation often requires operational and structural changes to how business is done. Such changes are difficult for any one employee, team, or even business unit to undertake.
In recent weeks, academics around the world have been collaborating, sharing tips, tricks, teaching plans and experiences to turn an often slow behemoth into an agile digital sprinter.
We hope that the world's response to the novel coronavirus has taught us that a truly shared experience of a common enemy can unlock the speed, strength and creativity needed to address even the greatest challenges.
A major crisis often disrupts the behavior of customers, employees, and partners. You may have reason to believe that customer preferences will remain the same, but often they will not.
Having established new ways of doing open innovation during a crisis can provide much-needed flexibility and ultimately ensure the viability of the business. Don't waste those experiences planning how to get back to normal. Plan a new normal.