Driving Business for an Open Innovation Culture

Most companies want and intend to innovate, but fail to keep up with their intentions. Although the range of activities in today’s world is abundant, what people miss is ‘awareness’. As Pieter Theil famously pointed out, ‘business innovation happens efficiently behind the scenes and not in the newspapers or once it’s on television. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Open innovation has various challenges and obstacles, so fostering companies for open innovation is about managing multiple ‘demons’ at the same time in a protracted battle. Very different from a small skirmish of a day. We didn’t want to fire off rhetoric challenging existing cultural obstacles.

building the team – There is one aspect where you hire the best and brightest people. You need those people who are ethical, who are ambitious and bold. And then there’s this whole other aspect of hiring the smartest, brightest set of fresh, young candidates. Administrative bureaucracy and ‘old guard’ ideas are death traps in this world of innovation, let alone open innovation! This is important to improve internal collaboration and bring a wave of new technologies and insights to solve a problem. This approach uses people to drive processes, knowledge, governance and technology towards open innovation. To realize how critical this aspect of equipment is,

technological exploration – To get a glimpse of the power and impact of open innovation, reach out to new partners and technologies in the area and topics your company has already identified. Build your skills in-house, bring in the experts who can help you not only with the idea, but also with the actual identification of your problem area and providing you with the list of people, organizations and technologies that can solve your problem! The advantage of bringing in experts is that you can already get ahead of IP strategy and frameworks for development. Technology Scouting takes advantage of the concept of business ecosystems through technological systems to solve needs. A more open field but one that cautiously seeks to make intellectual property useful and transform relationships.

Define innovation – Innovation is a rather abstract term. It means several things to several people and this could be a big cause of innovation failure. Innovation has various dimensions, forms and aspects. Perhaps a company is only looking for incremental innovation in its product. Another is perhaps to think about radical process innovation. Still a third might be interested in exploration, while a quarter has to do with innovation in service and management! This is a very important point that we believe needs to be addressed as ROI needs to be measured. How are you going to define ROI? Will it be commitment? Is it the number of ideas generated? Will it be based on the results of the investigation? Where has a company made headlines in the media about innovation?

The above indicators are just a glimpse into the war zone a company is entering. In all aspects and levels, there will be people who will resist a change of movement. The devil, people think, is in the change and not in the status quo. Younger employees will be given lesser responsibilities or their wings will be clipped. Inferior hires to ensure the personal growth of a person than the company. Risk aversion, Not Invented Here syndrome, the “only experts understand” mentality, and IP trolls will set Technology Scouting back. Leadership and an unwillingness to truly innovate will result in an ambiguous innovation strategy and framework and further abuse of the term!