Steps for Implementing Open Innovation: Recommendations from Our Community

Stefan Lindegaard

You are the innovation leader in your company. You want to implement open innovation. Which actions should you take and in which order? What are your key barriers?

I posted these questions through LinkedIn groups a couple of months ago. Maarten Meijer, Amanda Heath, Gordon McLeod, Lee Sellenraad and others helped with feedback that I have incorporated in this blog post. Thanks for your help, guys!

We all seemed to agree that top management involvement is important. I have often said that you need to align your innovation strategy with the overall corporate strategy. This is also a great way to involve top management in your innovation efforts. This also applies when you work to implement open innovation into your strategies. Perhaps even more as open innovation can really threaten the power base of managers making this a corporate culture issue.

This brings us to the next issue; getting the middle management into the loop. Middle managers have their own agendas to develop as well as their own powerbase to protect. They may see open innovation as an opportunity or as a threat. You need to understand the value of proper stakeholder management to win middle managers over to your side as the help and support they can give makes it more likely that open innovation actually will succeed. I have written a couple of earlier blog posts that get into this. TBX: An Approach To Developing The Innovation Culture and Can You Manage Your Stakeholders?

During the discussion, it was said that “…there is not much change of success if open innovation is not embraced, articulated and driven from the top down.” As mentioned above, I believe that top management involvement is needed, but open innovation does not necessarily have to be driven top down.

Most companies already have small pockets of successful open innovation and if the innovation leader can make these visible, a movement can also tickle up from the bottom making top management see the value in opening up to external partners. In general, this game is very much about getting the small wins that convinces the sceptics to continue down an unknown path.

So as you implement your plan, start with simpler initiatives to build trust, results and demonstrate outcomes that contribute to top line growth and bottom line profitability. With success you can refine your plan and transition to more complex issues.

This suggestion came from Lee Sellenraad, who also argued that innovation leaders should track the progress and establish baseline measurements for everything you do. It is always difficult to define measurements, but some ideas include core values desired, portfolio and project progress and comparison with generally acknowledged corporate and industry benchmarks. Try to quantify results so you can substantiate the value of your innovations.

Amanda Heath suggested these somewhat simplified actions:

1. Decide which areas you want to innovate in and articulate your needs as simply as possible.

2. Based on 1, work out (brainstorm) your innovation sources - from close in to you (suppliers, customers..) to far away from you (possibly most fruitful)

3. Devise your two-way communication pathways to your sources and how you will handle the ideas/technology/innovation when they arrive. In particular, pay attention to legal implications and intellectual property ownership.

4. Communicate your needs to your sources.

Besides the barriers already mentioned, Amada also advices us to pay attention to the resources required to do it effectively, the internal “not invented here” syndrome and how to find the right communication pathways to your target sources.

I also liked some suggestions by Gordon McLeod, who said that you should not just rely on internal innovation staff or a single department. You can use wikis and other social media tools to invite collaboration and contributions from the rest of the company and the entire external world. He also recommended defining carefully and publicly what you want to create, what you’ll do with the work of the collaborators (social innovation vs. profit), and how they’ll be credited (rewarded).

Gordon also urges innovation leaders to understand (and accept) that the work will be driven more by the needs/wants of the contributors and not necessarily by the original vision from your company. As Gordon puts it “What you originally wanted might not be what you eventually get - it’ll probably be better!”

You can read more about things to consider on approaching and implementing open innovation in this blog post: Approaching Open Innovation: Lessons From P&G

I enjoy such interactions with others although I have to say that I often lack the time to engage with you as much as I would like to. I try my best and please know that I really appreciate your input : - )