Congratulations! You have been tasked with implementing or re-implementing an open innovation program within your organization. What is your first thought? Google ‘open innovation’, read some books and papers, talk to people you know that are at companies that have active open innovation programs, hire a consultant or just wade in and try and make it happen? Actually, all of these are good things to do. Today, there is a rich body of knowledge about open innovation and how to create and implement a successful program.

For the last 15+ years, my work has consisted of consulting to companies that are engaged in large scale transformation programs such as re-engineering, SAP and most recently open innovation. If there is one lesson I learned from my consulting work that I would pass on to someone at the beginning of an open innovation program – it is to communicate, communicate and then communicate some more. Yes, you need a well articulated vision, clearly defined objectives and buy-in from leadership. You will need to make sure you know your innovation organization’s strengths and weaknesses. You will need to fully understand your innovation ecosystem (current network of partners/suppliers). At the foundation you will need to have some type of simple process to leverage your innovation ecosystem, and the people in the functional areas that interact with the open innovation process will need to understand their roles and responsibilities. All of this is necessary - and more.

Ultimately the long term adoption of open innovation will be a function of how well you communicate. You need to communicate that you are implementing open innovation, why you are implementing open innovation, and what you are learning along the way. Share the setbacks and successes and stories about the people on the front lines. This communication needs to happen in many forms, many places and not be limited to the open innovation group. And, when you think you have communicated enough, communicate some more. Think in terms of a constant drumbeat.

One of our clients talks about the three phases they are progressing through in their open innovation program. These are introducing, embedding and delivering. At each stage we have been communicating to the broad organization through multiple channels. They are seeing the benefits of this communication through new innovation as a result of both internal collaboration across business units and new external collaborations. They realize there is still much to be done, but they can see the change that is happening and a new mindset of open innovation emerging.

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.

My colleagues work closely with innovation champions who are the backbone of their companies' open innovation programs. They hear stories of frustration, elation and the day-to-day effort that is poured into their work to make open innovation a success. These champions are part change agents, motivational speakers, visionaries, and also the 'work horses' that get the job done.

There was an interesting article on Harvard Business Review's blog yesterday that addressed the unique challenges faced by innovation champions. The author, Rita McGrath, argues that success in open innovation "depends on middle managers, scientists, and intra corporate entrepreneurs scavenging for resources in an informal way". We see this in some cases but we also see a general recognition among our clients that this is clearly not sustainable and the proper processes, organizational design, technologies and yes, budget need to be established to maintain a successful program. We like it when 'serendipity' happens and we find a highly unexpected solution and solution provider for our client, but we don't think serendipity belongs anywhere within the foundation of the open innovation program.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, before anyone had heard of “crowd sourcing”, (coined in 2006) NineSigma clients were fascinated by the opportunity to reach into every corner of the globe for answers to their biggest challenges.  The focus was on “how” and “where” to get the solution.  NineSigma solved the “how” by providing the answer to “where”.

Fast forward to 2010…companies have more information than they can process.  Chat rooms, company-sponsored websites, OI intermediaries like NineSigma…Open Innovation can feel like the suggestion box on steroids.  The real challenge today is how to manage and optimize Open Innovation.

The companies that will be the Open Innovation leaders tomorrow are those that are successful in creating their Open Innovation Office – the structure that broadcasts the right information outside to the best external resources, and then funnels the value back inside to act on it efficiently.

We believe that three pillars are essential to building a successful, sustainable Open Innovation Office. 

Framework –Vision, Process and Organizational Design, and underlying Software

Support – People and resources to:

• Develop OI best practices and build OI adoption
• Manage the Needs Funnel, relationships with external partners and integration of OI projects into the product development cycle

OI Toolbox –Partners and tools to engage internally and externally

Framed by executive commitment to your OI Strategy and program management and accountability, these three pillars build an integrated, managed and optimized Open Innovation program.

Over the last ten years, we have either worked for or discussed working for a large number of companies that are implementing open innovation programs. Many times they have referred to NineSigma and others as Open Innovation intermediaries.

I have always pushed back when firms classify NineSigma as an OI intermediary. To me an intermediary is a group that simply connects two groups together and hopes for the best from the connection.

At NineSigma our work is focused across the two dimensions of Engage and Enable. Our Engage business is all about supporting our clients in solving a critical business challenge. This may involve finding and acquiring a platform technology to enable a suite of new products, it may be mapping out a white space and presenting options to our client on how to capitalize on new opportunities, it may be helping indentify new applications for existing technologies or it may be identifying and then contracting with a co-development partner.

The work typically involves broadly Engaging the global innovation community in order to deliver the desired results to our client. We use the term Engage to differentiate NineSigma's level of interaction with the global innovation community. Engage implies searching for and then engaging groups identified to deliver results to our client. Engaging means dialog, analysis, interpretation and synthesis to create a final work product that adds value to our client. This is much more that simply acting as an intermediary and connecting two groups together and hoping for a good result.

Just recently, Stefan Lindegaard released his new book, The Open Innovation Revolution.  I just finished reading it, and must say that I am glad to finally see such a practical and applicable piece of work hit the bookstore shelves.  Stefan took a non-academic approach, and loaded the book with real-life stories and quotes from those actually in the open innovation trenches, living and breathing this stuff.  And since he spent time talking with those in the trenches he was able to shed light on something that has been all too often ignored – the soft side.  By soft side, I am referring to the human element.  You know – the effects of change on culture, the importance of communication, human roadblocks, and the like.  Why am I so passionate about the soft side of open innovation?  It’s simple – I have seen too many companies try open innovation without paying attention to these things, only to end up abandoning their OI efforts without reaching their end goals. 

Another great point brought out in the book was the importance of finding the right open innovation champions and ‘intrapreneurs’.  These people are not your typical R&D managers.  Rather, they need to possess a unique set of skills ranging from diverse technical competencies to keen networking skills.  They are the face of a company’s open innovation effort and will need to represent this function both internally and externally.  These people are bridge builders, spanning the proverbial gap between marketing and R&D, and working across various business units to educate people and to entice them to use open innovation where and when it is most likely to demonstrate success.  With each success, this person communicates the results and continues to build momentum behind the cause.

These are key concepts addressed in The Open Innovation Revolution that should be strongly considered by every company embarking on a new open innovation journey.  The book gets right to the heart of what really matters, and should be read by anyone in the planning phase of open innovation, or anyone looking for ways to improve an already existing program.

I recently spoke at a number of conferences throughout South Africa on the topic of open innovation.  Knowing that open innovation was practiced primarily by large enterprises in the US, Asia and Europe, I was curious to see how a region populated mainly with small and medium sized enterprises would react to my talks.  Not only was I surprised by their warm reception to open innovation, but also by their deep knowledge and decisive action they were taking in this area.  In order to remain competitive in this dynamic world of rapid innovation, industry and science parks are picking up momentum in South Africa, and other parts of the world where small and medium sized enterprises are grouping together, both physically and collaboratively, to share costs, resources and ideas.   

The concept of the science park is a worldwide phenomenon, mainly seen in developing regions. The concept is based on cooperation between academia, industry and government operating in close proximity to strengthen the region’s innovation output.  In South Africa, which has a developing economy, the science park concept offers a means of becoming competitive with those fully developed regions that host major companies, universities and other key sources of innovation and knowledge.  Knowing the power wielded by large enterprises through their vast pool of resources and far-reaching supplier networks, these science parks are finding new ways to mimic this capability through collaboration and co-location.  Open innovation is an integral part of the science park concept.  What a company does not have in terms of innovation resources, may be found within one of the partnering companies.  And if still not found, members of the park will soon begin to share open innovation resources, for example, the NineSigma office that is being established at the South African Innovation Hub in Pretoria, which will be managed by our local partner in the region, RIIS.

It’s fascinating to see open innovation take root in areas like Sub-Saharan Africa.  The innovation efforts taking place today in such regions will soon begin to offer great insights and ideas for small and medium sized enterprises throughout the rest of the world.  We see such companies in Asia, North America and Europe struggle because of their limited resources – especially in today’s tough economy.  So perhaps the emerging science park model could offer a next chapter in open innovation and provide a means to accelerate innovation in this underserved market sector.

This post is by guest blogger Bruna Martinuzzi. This post originally appeared on AMEX Open Forum blog; reposted here with permission. 

I once worked for a technology company that encouraged employees to practice what they called “Intelligent Disobedience.” The concept originates from seeing-eye dogs: while dogs must learn to obey the commands of a blind person, they must also know when they need to disobey commands that can put the owner in harm’s way, such as when a car is approaching.

Intelligent disobedience is not about setting out to be disagreeable or arbitrarily disobeying rules for its own sake. Rather, it is about using your judgment to decide when, for example, an established rule actually hinders your organization, rather than helps it. The antonym of intelligent disobedience is blind conformity.  Conformity smooths our day’s journey at work.  Conformity, however, can have its downsides. It saps creativity for one, and it is, in John F. Kennedy’s parlance, “the enemy of growth.”

Here are some ideas to inspire you and others in your team to establish a culture that values intelligent disobedience:

1. Consider the benefits of decentralizing some of the decision-making in your unit.If you are used to making all the decisions, allow those closest to the customer the flexibility to make appropriate decisions on the spot. This places the value where it should be—on customer satisfaction rather than on lockstep adherence to the process—but it also places value on team members by giving them the authority to bend the rules when necessary.

2. Don’t surround yourself with yes-men.Ponder the words of Barry Rand of Xerox, quoted in Colin Powell’s A Leadership Primer: “…if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant.”

3. Beware of naysayers. Consider the source of those who vigorously advise you against a change initiative. Sharpen your social and organizational awareness skills by carefully analyzing what their self-interest might be. In this regard, take a page from Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services: “The status quo will always try to shoot down a good idea, especially if it threatens their position.”

4. Don’t take expert opinion as the final word. If your own experience or knowledge tells you otherwise, don’t automatically silence your inner voice because it is drowned by the din of the expert crowd. Above all, spend the time to glean the experts from the quasi-experts in your field.

5. Catch yourself if you habitually insist on “going by the book.” Ask yourself: Is this necessary for every issue? Might you enhance your team’s productivity if you paid more attention to the restraining effect that this could have on the people involved? What would happen if you built some elasticity in your rules, if you allowed others to apply standard procedures more flexibly?

6. Become aware of your mental scripts.In Everyday Survival: Why Smart People do Stupid Things, Laurence Gonzales talks about the dumb mistakes we make when we work from a mental script that does not match the requirements of the real-world situation. Mental scripts are our conditioned responses to various situations. Mental scripts push us, for example, to stubbornly cling to the notion that “this is how we have always done it” and to refuse to accept the realities of a new situation.  So we find ourselves mistakenly generalizing into the future whatever worked in the past—this is a slippery path.

7. Help your people distinguish between fact and conjecture. Conjecture can be influenced by mental scripts which don’t have a bearing on current reality. Be the voice in the room that calls attention to this possibility and help everyone pause so that they can analyze inferences and conjectures that may or may not be valid.

8. Examine your reaction when confronted with new ideas. Seth Godin compiled a list of responses to actual good ideas.  If any of these describe some of your habitual responses, consider how you might practice being more receptive to others’ notions. Defending the status quo is a sure-fire way to extinguish the spark of new ideas in your group.

9. Establish a culture that values common sense over bureaucracy. Encourage everyone on your team to cast a critical eye on all procedures, practices and policies in their area. Which ones are no longer relevant? Which ones impede or delay the flow of critical information? Which ones cause make-shift work? Which ones are plain dumb? Which traditions have petrified?

10. Get comfortable saying no. Intelligent disobedience also involves having the ability to say no. If you struggle with this, read The Power of a Positive No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship and Still Say No.  In the book, William Ury, outlines how to master the art of delivering what he calls “a positive No.”  This is a powerful three-step process of marrying a No with a Yes:

a) Yes! (Becoming conscious of the positive foundation for your No—for example, core interests or values)

b) No. (Respectfully explaining your No, linking it to your positive foundation)

c) Yes? (Having a plan B—that is, another positive outcome for the other party)

11. Make it safe for people to push back.This provides a platform from which people can rise and develop, and is also the mark of a confident leader who has the maturity to know that he or she cannot possibly have all the right answers. Allow others to connect the dots their own way.

12. Be aware of mind traps that lead to blind conformity. Mind traps act as mental straight-jackets, preventing you from thinking creatively and rationally.  These include, for example, the “herd instinct”, i.e. relying on the fact that “everybody else is doing it.” Here is a compiled list of the ten most common thinking traps.

13. Question the blind assumptions that can hurt your business. In

Rules to Break and Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism (Microsoft Executive Leadership Series), the authors expose three false assumptions about how a business creates value—these are, among the rules to consider breaking:

a) The best measure of success for your business is current sales and profit

b) With the right sales and marketing effort, you can always get more customers

c) Company value is created by offering differentiated products and services

14. Reconsider your need for harmony at the expense of progress. We are often reticent to challenge the process for fear of disquieting others who resist change. A component of emotional intelligence is the ability to be a change catalyst: to build the courage to champion change despite opposition.

15. Become aware of your three most rigidly-held beliefs. Write them down. Explore what cognitive shifts you can make to soften your position on these. Think of the emotions that drive these beliefs. Could some of them be motivated by fear? What might these unbendable beliefs prevent you from achieving?

The well-beaten path may be comfortable because it allows us to move along, without having to exert much effort, but it is the path that ultimately leads to mediocrity.  As Emerson said, long ago, “Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”  If you are a leader in charge of others, allow space for them to leave their own footprints.

a) Yes! (Becoming conscious of the positive foundation for your No—for example, core interests or values)

b) No. (Respectfully explaining your No, linking it to your positive foundation)

c) Yes? (Having a plan B—that is, another positive outcome for the other party)

Bruna Martinuzzi is the President of Clarion Enterprises Ltd., Clarion Enterprises Ltd. a firm that specializes in emotional intelligence, leadership and presentation skills training. Her latest book, The Leader as a Mensch, explains how you can become the kind of person others want to follow.

Here we are in 2010, some seven years after Henry Chesbrough published the book Open Innovation and we are still seeing a wide disparity in results from open innovation initiatives. In addition, there are many companies that are still trying to determine if they should even try or pilot an open innovation program. What does organizational culture have to do with the success of open innovation?

Hill and Jones defined organization culture in their book Strategic Management (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.”

If we break this definition down (at a very high level) and apply it to open innovation can we glean any insights?

First, let’s explore the phrase “collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization.” If an organization has always relied on internal resources for innovation and all of the major successes have originated internally, then it will by default be hard to convince this group of people to suddenly change the way they have innovated in the past to look broadly outside of the organization for co-development partners. On the other hand, if there have been innovation successes that have originated through supplier or university partnerships in the past, then this group of people will be much more receptive to changing to be more open to new innovations that originate from outside the firm.

The phrase “control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization” lends insight as well. Here “interact with stakeholders outside the organization” is insightful. Many times we have seen an organization overcome the hurdle of reaching broadly outside the organization to search for new co-development partners only to hit a wall when having to assess what they find from outside the organization and build agreements for co-development and sharing of intellectual property.

One of the lessons I have learned over the years is that you cannot directly change culture. You can change individual behaviors and through this process slowly change culture. In looking at organizations that have benefited from open innovation, what I have seen is an emphasis on changing behaviors through training, rewards, recognition and managers that constantly ask – Have you looked outside? What did you find? How did you use what you found?

I admit, I have had some lingering questions in the past year or so about the role of Twitter in a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. I've even questioned what Twitter can do for me personally - is it information? is it entertainment? And then I had a sort of social media epiphany as colleagues were gearing up for the Front End of Innovation US conference yesterday in Boston. I was really wishing I was there as I had worked with our President, Matthew Heim, and our panelists from clients Hallmark, Philips Consumer Lifestyle and Sealed Air over the past couple months to prepare for the event. I knew that FEI had invited people to live blog and Tweet from the event, but when I finally tuned in I was impressed. This was real content that made me feel (almost) like I was there. Here are some of the key takeaways I learned through the Twitter coverage:

• Hallmark's Esselman: once "open innovation" mindset was formalized, existing suppliers became extremely competitive

• Philips' Graham Mott: continuous innovation must be driven from top down, but the challenge is keeping champions' enthusiasm up

• Hallmark wants to create an emotionally-connected world and they see consumers defining emotional connections

• Blaine Childress [Sealed Air] talking about how IP personnel inside AND outside the organization have fears - lose my job versus lose my idea

• Tom Esselman [Hallmark]- Crisp definition of needs to commercialize open innovations makes open innovation more likely to be faster

• Graham Mott talking about how stating challenge too broadly will make it hard to sort through the submissions and evaluate them

And at the end of the day there was a great FEI blog post capturing the key learnings from the NineSigma panel session. Now, I know that live blogging and Tweeting is not unique to FEI and that plenty of other events do this. However, the quality of reporting and integration between the different media helped me see the light; that when executed properly, social media can involve you in a physical event in a way that traditional media cannot. I am a believer (well...I am getting there).