Seeking to Innovate?

Accelerate your company's innovation capacity

INNOVATION RESOURCES

Stefan Lindegaard on Open Innovation

Articles from long-time blogger and open innovation guru, Stefan Lindegaard

Open Innovation's Essential Element: Trust

Trust is fundamental to open innovation. Without everyone involved believing they can rely on the good faith of the others, little of real consequence will happen. Trust comes at many levels – internally as well as externally. As you move toward open innovation, you should begin to look into two questions:

What does it take for you to trust others?
How do you convince your external stakeholders to build trust in you and your company and then start forging strong relationships?

The necessity of building trust as a basis for successful open innovation makes looking at the people side of innovation to the forefront, rather than concentrating on processes. It also brings more power to the people who really drive innovation within a company. Why? Because trust is first and foremost established between people and then perhaps between organizations. Trust is a personal thing, and the innovation leaders who understand this are suddenly in a much better position with regards to making things happen and creating an interesting and challenging career.

What are the barriers against building trust and relationships with stakeholders in your eco-system?

Most organizational structures foster an internal rather than an external perspective.
Most companies view external partners as someone paid to deliver a specific service rather than a source of co-creation and open innovation. This can be particularly true when there is a significant size discrepancy between the partners.
Most companies are more focused on protecting their own knowledge and intellectual property rather than opening up and exploring new opportunities. They play defense rather than offense.
Forging strong relationships takes time and personal commitment. We are just too busy to make it happen and it does not help that most companies do not provide the necessary time, resources, and encouragement to make this happen.

What should you do to foster an organizational mindset that supports the building of trust?

The most difficult situation faced by most innovation leaders working with open innovation is that they are alone. This is a new way of doing things, and it will develop many corporate antibodies in the form of people who just want things to stay as they have always been.

This is a very normal reaction; many people feel threatened by something that is new and doesn't seem to match what has led the organization to success in the past. So you do not get much support for this new way of thinking from anyone within your company. They might see this could be interesting but once they begin to understand that you have to make significant changes in the way you are dealing with external stakeholders, they begin to raise obstacles rather than see opportunities.

When you have recruited enough people with a proper mindset, then you have laid the foundation for trust, which in turn makes everyone accept that strong relationships are the key to business success in the future. Now you are ready for open innovation.

Unfortunately, it is my experience that few companies have laid this foundation, and this will not happen unless you become successful in recruiting the right people with the right mindset. You can more or less just forget about processes and concepts because when it comes to open innovation it is the mindset that matters the most. If you get the mindset right, the implementation of processes will be so much easier to deal with.

This post was adapted from The Open Innovation Revolution: Essentials, Roadblocks, and Leadership Skills, authored by Stefan Lindegaard and published by John Wiley & Sons.

[NEXT ARTICLE]

Visit IdeaConnection at these upcoming conferences: