How you can use open innovation

Open innovation is about sharing your needs and ideas in order to obtain valuable feedback and find new potential collaboration partners. The term “open innovation” was coined by Dr. Henry Chesbrough in 2003, in the book “Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology”.

“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”

Here are some tips on how to best succeed with open innovation

1. Ask the right question!
Even if you want a huge response to your challenge, be sure to specify your needs and what criteria an idea should fulfil in order for it to be of use to you. What are you looking for and why?

2. Offer the right incentives
Open innovation is about engaging other people, but to do that you must convince contributors to participate! What can make participation worthwhile? It is important to think through what you want, why you are doing it and who you are asking, and to devise incentives accordingly.

Sometimes a prize may be offered to the best idea; sometimes you may want to offer a little something to show your appreciation to all participants. In other cases people may get involved just because it’s fun, or because they will receive recognition for their work, or to expand their own network.

3. Attract and engage the right audience
Try to involve a mixed audience from different backgrounds and with different skill levels. And remember that the larger the audience you reach, the greater the likelihood of a successful outcome. Don’t be surprised if you have to spend a lot of time reaching out to potential contributors to get them to participate.

4. Make it easy for people to participate
Engaging people is one of the hardest things about open innovation, so it must be easy to actually participate. Don’t initially ask for an extremely detailed and comprehensive report. Also, be sure to explain clearly what you want help with and why.

5. Offer guidance and feedback
Once you have received ideas or input, you (like the contributors) will get more value from the ideas if you start a positive dialogue about them in order to improve them. Strive to improve participants’ ideas by asking questions, and share constructive feedback and guidance. This will contribute towards improvements that will be beneficial both for you and for your contributors!