Is Covid the right time for Open Innovation ?

Prof. Henry Chesbrough of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkely, coined the term Open Innovation over a decade ago, or specifically seventeen years back in 2003.  (click for his HBR podcast here.) According to Prof. Henry Chesbrough  

Open Innovation is the distributed innovation process involving flows of knowledge across organisational boundaries for both monetary and non-monetary reasons in line with the organisation business model. 

An organisation has knowledge within it's boundaries as also outside it. Organisations are ready and willing to take knowledge from outside but are they ready tio share their knowledge with the outside world ?

In open innovation when an organisation shares its ideas with ideas, there is a possibility the external organisation looks at the idea from a different perspective and can come up with a use or application never thought before. The potential of ideas and sharing thoughts is so powerful.   

When one does Open Innovation 

• one need not always start from scratch, it may be from the middle
• one can get to market faster with the new product or application and
• share the risks and losses with the other players

Times of crisis have been great opportunities for organisations to try out different ideas. Similarly they have done during the Covid time. 

The Covid crisis has got the world to understand one major lesson, we are all in it together. There is no escape for any one person or community from the effects of the crisis. All major crisis going to befall humanity are indeed ones that have global impact, like for instance, global climate change. The experiences we get from this crisis should form our learning to tackle the next global crisis. 

Open Innovation or Crowd Sourcing is one of the best  ways to solicit workable, plain practical ideas from the teams and affected individuals.

During crisis times,. how can we make open innovation work ?

1. Don't ask for or insist on IP rights - concentrate more on sharing your advantageous position with others to produce products that can benefit humanity during this tough time

2. Leverage two sided innovation -  companies have come to realise that they need participation from the employees and managerial staff or partners together to succeed.

3. Embrace new partners - earl;ier we were working with limited partners. Now with the global crisis , suddenly companies are xposed to international  willing partners and collaborators

4. Urgency leads to transformation - it is a crisis like situation that brings the best in any person or organisation. Similarly a Covid crisis like situation has brought the bright companies and their people to work together for brilliant solutions to tackle this global crisis.

We can unitedly and through open innovation initiatives tackle major crisis likely to befall humanity in the future.

George..

Ref: 1. Linus Dahlander and Martin Wallin, Why now is the time for Open Innovation, HBR, June 2020.