Open innovation
Instruction: Your task is to participate in an online open innovation platform. You are to participate in the process over the duration of the semester and produce a report and analysis based on your experience, the strengths and weaknesses of these platforms, and open and ‘co-innovation’ more broadly. You are now a researcher. Your report is to be no more than 1500 words. You need to demonstrate an understanding of open innovation and co-innovation, document your real participation and engagement, and based on your experience and readings, reflect on the implications for organisations such as firm strategy, performance, idea generation, business models, intellectual property protection etc. It will be important to engage several times over the course of the semester i.e. you can see what the public think of your contributions, or follow another participant over time to provide a valuable report on how this process works and its impact.
Solution.
Open innovation
Open innovation is a platform where there is an inflows and outflows of knowledge to increase internal innovation and grow the markets for external use of innovation. Professor Henry Chesbrough initiated the concept in 1960 (Chesbrough H. W., 2006 ). Open innovation involves the participation and engagement between internal and external partners to jointly build better products with better ideas. This means that open innovation extends from the usual working environment through its network of collaboration across different line of profession (Chesbrough H. W., 2006 ).
Many corporation have taken up the concept, which adds up to the traditional practices, new and opens forms of collaboration (Gassmann, Enkel, & Chesbrough, 2010). Based on open innovation platforms, the concept has been developed based on a built-in phase gate model. This means that the ideas are developed in phases and passes through different validation stages before meeting its final objective. According to the platform, the concept focuses on people on its members who share debate, assess and endorse ideas as well as solve problems as they keep strategic alignment (Gassmann, Enkel, & Chesbrough, 2010).
Open innovation platforms gives the opportunity to engage with people by intensely contributing to building an open, evolving community. This concept gives the opportunity to focus on effort and funding on hopeful ideas and spinning them into real time projects with better prospect and viability (Chesbrough & Crowther, 2006). Open innovation platforms enables one to get customized stages to sustain in-house collaboration such as marketing, finance, general management and any other division involved in the modernization process.
The platform can also deployed with preferred partners, that is, one can open the platform to a number of free-lancers and business partners. The good prospect about this concept is that it allows for joint work with a dedicated members only web platform. This means one is able to work within a collaborative network (Chesbrough & Crowther, 2006). According to the engagements, it is possible for one to fully access an open mode model. However, this process requires a cautious management due to its ability to allow anyone to access and participate in the collaboration process. Nevertheless, most importantly, the mode is valuable to a viral promoting strategy.
Open innovation platform is an efficient process for ideas and product co-development dais with unlimited number of ideas. This gives the concept a one-stop shop in order to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. It is also valuable due to its alignment that exist. This is well demonstrate in its phase-gate model, which ensures the emerging projects, product, and services are aligned with strategy put in place (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010). In addition, there is room for implementation for new ideas through their recycle bin process. Collaborative process require trust in order for the process to work.
Therefore, open innovation platform gives visibility on emerging ideas which essentials for the support of real time collaboration between divisions or with external associates (Lichtenthaler, 2011). The platforms also allows room for inclusivity, which means that all associates can get the opportunity to suggest ideas, express opinions and offer competencies with fairness. Through this inclusivity, the collaboration process can be effective and offer the appropriate results that is needed. Open innovation platforms requires the latest practices in order to stay ahead of the market. This platform has an effective two-way tool that is based on the up-to-date open innovation practices and social media approach (Lichtenthaler, 2011).
Co-innovation and implications
Lee, Oslon and Trimi developed the concept in the earlier years. The concept is based on collective intelligence, which is now organized in three pillars, that is, convergence of ideas, collaborative arrangement and co-creation of experience. According to Chesbrough and Bogers, Co-innovation involves two or more partners achieve shared knowledge flows across managerial boundaries over joint modernization and commercialization activities (Chesbrough & Crowther, 2006).
Companies no longer sit behind closed doors and design new enterprise software tools for their consumers. They instead co-innovate with their key clients and vendors in building the tackles that is valuable to the customers. Companies have now realized that with co-innovation in play, they can offer new and better products to their customers with feature updates made available much easier and faster than they would if they acted alone (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010). As part of open innovation platforms, companies need to realize the need to forego the traditional boundaries and processes if they want to achieve full value from open innovation. This means that performance standards, relationships, education and organizational laws must be tightly held.
Co-innovation is an innovation paradigm where new ideas and approaches from various internal and external sources are integrated in a platform to generate new organizational and shared values. For an organization, the objective of core innovation includes co-creation and compelling experience for value creation. Therefore, co-innovation practices has been become a necessary tool for organization because of its difficulty to imitate by competition (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010). This gives organization’s competitive advantages over other market producers and service provider, hence improving performance of the firm in the market.
Open innovation and co-innovation has numerous organizational implications that may affect how we do work. Corporate organizations need to make big changes within their structure, training programmes and other upgrades in the next coming years. This is because organizations are required to share ideas, risk and reward while innovating with partners or other business associates (Lichtenthaler, 2011). Other general implications may involve sharing knowledge and people, creating value through collaborative networks instead of handling it in –house. Open innovation and co-innovation have made the business environment become a sophisticated process where everybody wants to use the ideas but do not know what it is (Lichtenthaler, 2011).
Open innovation and co-innovation is severely disrupting many organizations as it is becoming easier to tap into good ideas anywhere in the world (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010). This is becoming a necessary process because organizations need to stay ahead of competition. However, open-innovation and co-innovation is changing very fast as organizations are unable to predict where the next threat or opportunity will come from (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010).
Concerning size, large organization are more likely to face such major issues due to their vulnerability, as small organizations are more likely to work together. In addition, large organizations are still in the process of coming to terms with the connected world as most organization started years before innovation (Lee, Park, Yoon, & Park, 2010). According to most researchers, large organizations tend to reduce their understanding of their consumer’s behaviors as they grow (Lichtenthaler, 2011). However, open and co-innovation platforms help such organizations in understanding their consumers better.
In open innovation and co-innovation, organizations are required to enhance communication, networking and stakeholder management, which is important in the open innovation platforms (Lichtenthaler, 2011). Organizations are forced to use innovation as an administration discipline in order to turn it into an open innovation capability. Organizations are also required to play a more vivacious role in improving teamwork skills, teaching employees in the responsibility of constructing and encouraging relationships and detecting accepted connectors within the organizations (Lichtenthaler, 2011).
References
Chesbrough, H. W. ( 2006 ). Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. New York: Harvard Business Press.
Chesbrough, H., & Crowther, A. K. (2006). Beyond high tech: early adopters of open innovation in other industries. R&D Management Journal, 229–236.
Gassmann, O., Enkel, E., & Chesbrough, H. (2010). The future of open innovation. R&D Management Journal, 213–221.
Lee, S., Park, G., Yoon, B., & Park, J. ( 2010). Open innovation in SMEs—An intermediated network model. Research Policy , 290–300.
Lichtenthaler, U. (2011). Open Innovation: Past Research, Current Debates, and Future Directions. Academy Of Management Journal, 75-93 .
