I have always respected Nokia which I consider to be a quite innovative company. Lately, I have been wondering how they approach open innovation so I did some research on their activities.First, let’s take a look at how Nokia defined open innovation in a presentation given by Kari-Pekka Estola, VP, Nokia Research Center in 2007.”The sourcing, integration, and development of product and business system innovations through win-win external partnerships to capture maximum commercial value for R&D investment.”Kari-Pekka Estola also argued that open innovation is a critical trend and not yet another management fad due to these reasons:Innovation happens in smaller companies, global innovation hotspots and increasingly influential user communities.Several factors such as workforce mobility and venture capital are eroding the ability of corporate research labs to contain their useful knowledge.A new breed of independent research labs create a new source of R&D development.”Innomediaries” – innovation intermediaries – are enabling an … Continue reading →

The longer you hang around a subject, the more interesting the rumors and misperceptions. Innovation seems to spawn a number of fallacies, probably because it is very important, haphazardly performed and misunderstood by management. The combination of importance, carelessness and ignorance probably spawns a lot of fallacies. In fact, it sounds a lot like teen sex in a way.One interesting new fallacy that seems to be making the rounds is that “open innovation” is easier and cheaper than innovation within the four walls of your organization. Open innovation can drive more ideas, and in many cases simply bypasses the bureaucracy and sloth of an organization to attract a number of people from outside the organization. In this manner open innovation can be faster, but it is not cheaper or less expensive, nor does it require fewer resources. Open innovation just shifts the costs from an innovation team, or R&D, to … Continue reading →

I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:”Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not so obvious with other professions. Engineers are prone to share, to seek out other engineers when they face a mental block.”Wow! Are good engineers … Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing is becoming a part of many companies’ innovation strategy. But crowdsourcing suffers from a number of problems that limit its effectiveness. By selecting ‘emerging customers’ – who are better at spotting winning innovations – and helping them innovate around unmet customer needs, crowdsourcing can be turned into smartsourcing. Leading companies like Cisco already use smartsourcing to identify tomorrow’s winning innovations.Peter Drucker the gurus’ guru famously said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Marketing is hard enough to get right, but innovation is a whole lot harder still. Depending on the industry, about 80% of new products fail on introduction in the market. And up to 60% fail in reintroduction. To overcome this disastrous failure rate, companies have started to recruit … Continue reading →