Author Archives: Debbie Goldgaber
This is the seventh of several ‘Innovation Perspectives’ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘How should firms collaborate with customers and/or value chain partners to co-create new products and services?’. Here is the next perspective in the series: by Debbie Goldgaber Defining Co-Creation As a general rule, when you embark on a project it’s important to take a moment to define your terms. This is particularly important with the term co-creation, because it’s easy to conflate it with the more general concept of open innovation or open product development. Co-creation sounds like you might be asking your client and value-chain partners to help you create new products and services, by intervening in several or all steps of the traditional product development cycle. In fact, experts tend to see product co-creation a little bit differently, insofar as the focus is not on a … Continue reading
On the Harvard Business Review blog, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, recently wrote a thought-provoking piece on the future of open innovation. They make many keen observations about the limitation companies currently face in making effective use of “Transactional Open Innovation” (TOI), defined below. However, they wrongly conclude that this is an inherent limitation of the TOI tools themselves, instead of a limit related to the way that enterprises presently organize R&D practices and processes.Where Hagel et al., are most astute is with respect to identifying the drivers of open innovation, e.g rapid depreciation of “information stocks” and an Internet ecology rapidly evolving to facilitate the flow of information. These are the reasons that forward-looking companies like General Mills and P&G launched their often-cited open innovation experiments. Other companies, the authors of the HBR piece suggest, are following suite, at least in part, as a result … Continue reading
