Open Innovation (OI), a well proven strategy for CTOs, marketing and R&D, is now gaining advocates amongst the CIOs, strategic business planning teams and CFO level financial management inside Global 500 companies.

Changing culture and the way organizations have always done things is a leader’s greatest challenge and I’m anxious to assess how well corporations can adopt OI across the customer facing operations side of the business.

I believe that the opportunity to quickly acquire new knowledge for services, business process, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and new business models can exceed the value or competitive market share gain from OI for a new product.  Costco can adopt a Bank’s branch office customer service ideas or automobile manufacturers can adopt a new business process model from Starbucks for the automobile dealerships service department.  And the software to support the processes and assess business metrics for the CFO can be acquired as well and implemented by the CIO.

In some cases a business offering services is competing against a business providing products.  John Deere and other equipment manufacturers could begin losing lawn care product sales as the lawn care service provider sells lifestyle choices and long term cash flow as a reason to not buy the new mower.  John Deere needs to look outside the manufacturing industry for the next innovation to win market share from the lifestyle choices available to their customers.  And, what industry would John Deere look to for managing the financial risk issues in the transition process?  Perhaps the automobile manufacturing industry that adopted Starbucks business process model for auto services.

Boy it's hard to stay focused today while tracking the latest live tweets from the CoDev 2010 conference and live blogs of the Apple event to launch the iPad (not to mention documenting project status reports, updating my NineSigma portal with new projects, etc.).  But actually, this hunger for new information (and how to make sense of it) is an important characteristic we look for in our own employees, and is also a driving force in the Open Innovation Champions we meet every day.  But what other skills are needed, and how can you spot your company's next Open Innovation Champion? 

First, it is important to recognize that (at least for now) 99% of the Open Innovation Champion roles are created internally by companies (so far I have seen very little movement to fill these roles externally).  This is because it is important for these OI Champions to really understand their organization, the IP requirements and preferences, and how much the organization can stretch.  Quite often, it is redefining a role that someone has been playing already informally, so filling internally makes a lot of sense. 

Critical internal experience also includes success at team building, visibility with the organization (and credibility across multiple disciplines, not just for the technical organization), exposure to corporate/business strategic goals/initiatives, and experience navigating approval and gaining buy-in to new initiatives (not to mention flexibility and adaptability).

In terms of external skills: deal facilitation experience, comfort interfacing with vendors/university partners/etc., and a passion for external collaboration.

Additionally, since OI Champions have to juggle quite a few tasks (many are in this role only part-time), excellent organization and communications skills are a must. It is critical for the Champion to be able to build, collect, and communicate best practices within the company and outside of it, and having ninja-like Excel and Powerpoint skills certainly is a plus.  

What is really quite interesting, is that although many of the OI Champions "grew up" through R&D or product development, OI Champions can really come from any role - marketing, business, operations, legal.  This reinforces how Corporate Innovation initiatives cross many different disciplines and organizations.  And as these roles continue to evolve (along with the evolution of the corporate innovation strategies), continued learning and training are essential. 

What thoughts do you have on good (or bad) characteristics for OI champions?  Feel free to comment below.

The technical and popular press have devoted a great deal of attention to open innovation, and the concept of being "open", in recent years. It is undoubtedly the way all companies are headed, to varying degrees. I wanted to touch on the concept of Openness, and how I have come to view it.

Prior to launching an open innovation program, the leadership team should do a quick check of the organization’s degree of openness. Here I define openness within the context of open innovation across two dimensions. The first is the organization’s willingness to openly share information externally.  The second dimension is being open to embracing and acting on new, innovative ideas that are presented to the organization from the global innovation community.

For open innovation to be successful, organizations must be open to sharing their innovation needs with the global innovation community. It is hard for an external group to determine how they can offer effective help to an organization that will not share what it is seeking. Clearly, this does not mean sharing competitive or confidential information with the global innovation community. But, we see many organizations struggling with what they can share, when they can share it and how best to share. NineSigma’s Program Managers have worked with many organizations to help them answer these questions and to develop Briefs describing innovation needs that can be broadly shared with the global innovation community.

The second aspect of openness is the willingness of the organization to embrace and act on new, innovative ideas from outside the organization. Many times we see firms overcome the challenge of sharing what they seek - only to not follow up on what they find. Here the challenge is being open to ideas that did not originate within the firm. Some may refer to this as NIH, but many times it is more a matter of the firm’s reward systems and culture.

As the leadership team considers an open innovation program or initiative, they should take some time to assess the organization’s openness. The degree of openness will play a pivotal role in the overall success of the open innovation program. If the leadership team is concerned about openness then they should consider including a change management workstream in the open innovation program.