With the front pages covered everyday with news on the financial crisis, one would almost expect that Europe has come to a screeching halt. Nothing would be further from the truth with relation to open innovation. Although European companies have traditionally been a bit slower in adopting new management practices, they tend to more structurally integrate these practices in the organization when they are adopted. Our observation is that more companies are implementing open innovation practices. There is an increase in roundtable discussions and industry specific networks such as the Food and Drink Innovation Network, where companies are sharing their learnings in practicing open innovation.

Accenture and the Institute for Innovation and Competitiveness i7 created by ESCP Europe studied 20 large international companies that are actively leveraging open innovation and asked the question of whether open innovation is really a new business concept or is a practice that simply has a new label. The study, published this week, uncovered some interesting takeaways:

• Open innovation as practiced now involves a structured and systematic approach for bringing outside inside. There is now a more manageable end to end process.
• There has been a fast pace of adoption: only 10 years from first movers to wide adoption, the early majority came into play in 2010.
• There has been a significant increase in external resources available, which can potentially create huge operational challenges.
• Positioning the open innovation strategy on the right openness scale: combining topic-driven approaches with partner-oriented open innovation
• Defining the right balance between depth and breadth of relationships with partners: the most advanced companies are widening the scope and variety of partners.
• Excelling at the partner management process: creating a real win – win; advanced companies have structured and standardized these processes.
• There is no open innovation “free lunch”: all companies involved have invested in capabilities like organization, skills, tools and governance to make open innovation happen (60% of the companies have invested with NineSigma)
• It is not only about appointing a “Chief Open Innovation Officer”: changing the culture and developing absorptive capacity and making open innovation a natural part and recurring way of practicing innovation.
• Open innovation works: the study shows that open innovation reduces time to market even though it gets more complex with external partners. It also improves intellectual property protection, helps promote the sustainability agenda and enhances the company’s innovativeness.

The full report can be downloaded here.  

With our growing client base in Europe, we have added new team members to our group including Marcel Zillig supporting our clients in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; George Vincent as head of our activities in the UK; Pantea Lotfian has responsibility for our intelligence and landscape projects; and Campbell Lockhart supports clients on implementing open innovation inside their organization.

I look forward to connecting with you. Let me know your thoughts on how open innovation is advancing in the European market. 

One of my US colleagues said that the refreshing thing about Europe is that it has 20 or so very different systems which all, in some way or another, seem to be working. Multiple solutions for the same need, that seems like the essence of Open Innovation. Was OI invented in Europe?

Reading the article ´Connect and Develop´ by the very American Harvard Business Review inspired me in 2006 to start a company in open innovation providing expert services. The idea was simple enough:  disclose the enormous innovation potential for companies in Europe by engaging the people who actually invented all the technology and developed all the great products of the last 20 years. They were going to retire anyway and it seemed like a great idea to intelligently use this wealth of wisdom.

There was one small challenge to overcome: getting the companies to engage with these top experts.

One of my lessons learned from working in open innovation in the past four years was that corporations lack the interface for actually sourcing and engaging with external partners in innovation. One of the CTO´s in a more philosophic mode remarked that it was related to the unbalance between “Yes” and “No” inside corporations. If someone says “Yes”  to something from the outside they are required to explain and defend their choice for working with an outside party. Saying  “No” obviously does not require explanation, even if it would be discarding the million dollar idea…

It goes to show that we should applaud the heroes that actually say yes to collaborative innovation, willing to explain themselves to their superiors, colleagues and existing partners. Within NineSigma Europe we are very aware and grateful for the champions that we have at the clients in Open Innovation. That is why we want to organize a way to recognize these champions and create some visibility for those people and organizations that lead OI.

More on this in my next Blog.

Contact us today to find out how our open innovation experts can help you.