Maximizing Your Open Innovation Project
A classic business leadership story tells of Tom Watson Jr.’s, former head of IBM, meeting with a Vice President who had lost $10 million on a failed experiment. The VP came into the meeting fully expecting to be reprimanded and fired. Instead, Watson asked “why would we want to lose you when we’ve just given you a $10 million education?”
Most leaders will agree that there are plenty of benefits to developing a culture of risk-taking and by fostering an environment where employees are not afraid of failure. However, those same people will probably also agree that they’d prefer that ideas be tested thoroughly enough that they fail early on rather than after sinking significant time and resources into them.
If your organization has been considering utilizing open innovation to solve a business problem but are concerned that it might be too risky, here are some questions to ask yourself.
Does your organization have strong internal innovation in place? If you don’t have a solid ability to filter ideas, compare them against each other and develop them, then the organization risks ending up with an overwhelming amount of information that may not be entirely useful.
Do you have justifiable reasons for choosing open innovation or are you simply copying the competition? Not all problems lend themselves to be solved using open innovation. Solid business reasons should back a choice to use open innovation for a specific initiative. These reasons need to be clear enough to communicate effectively with the stakeholders (employees, partners, customers) whose support is required for the initiative to succeed.
Have you taken an assessment of the risks? Transitioning to open innovation involves exposing previously guarded practices. It requires acceptance that outsides might be able to solve a problem better than insiders. That can be a scary, risky, difficult transition to make if an organization does not prepare itself for the change. A great example is the process General Mills took to improve their innovation effectiveness.
To read about more projects that lend themselves to open innovation, check out these Success Stories. You can search for case studies that match your industry, like education or government or the functional area of your problem like marketing or R&D.
Reader Comments
"why would we want to lose you when we've just given you a $10 million education?"
If only all bosses are as understanding. Then again, R&D always comes with risk. Nearly everything does. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."
Posted by Fred M. on September 13, 2011
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