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.