The fast product cycle and increasing product complexity are making it difficult for even large companies to solely rely on internal resources for product innovation. This trend was first promoted as “Open Innovation platforms” by Henry Chesbrough and over the last decade has been successfully implemented by companies such as P&G, Johnson & Johnson, and others for their open innovation platform initiatives. Have you wondered what open innovation means? Is it the same as an engineering innovation platform?
An open innovation platform is a collaborative platform that encourages and facilitates ideas and creativity. As suggested by the name it produces creativity and innovation through external knowledge and diverse perspectives to enhance problem-solving within organizations. Through crowdsourcing and collaboration tools, open innovation platforms break down traditional bottlenecks and boundaries, which allows companies to tap into a broader ecosystem of talent. Businesses use innovation by actively engaging employees, customers, and partners. This process leads to new ideas and perspectives. Overall, open innovation platforms provide a dynamic and responsive framework.
The following are some links that will give you the feel of how the open innovation platform is designed and implemented. There may be a lot of open innovation tools in the market. these open innovation tools are instrumental in several ways. Let’s go through the open innovation platform which is the best business innovation platform.
The recent trend in Open Innovation is making it fashionable for many companies to create an Open Innovation Platform without any real innovation strategy behind it. Digital innovation platform helps companies make fashionable choices. Often it leads to internal confusion and the inability to manage the influx of ideas when the doors are made open to the outside world. Practicing Open Innovation without a clear purpose and strategy can also hurt the brand image since public frustration can spill over into social media. An open innovation platform and engineering innovation plan will ease things up for businesses.
Strategic Lookouts for Implementing Open Innovation Platform
Each company should deeply think about how “open” they need to be, with whom, how it will advance their product or service innovation, and how they can be “open” without giving away their secret sauce. Open innovation platforms are a must-have for everyone.
Also which part an organization “opens” depends on the need and sensitivity areas. Each functional area of an organization can participate in the open innovation process and open innovation platform but the leadership of an organization has to create the open innovation strategy and digital innovation platform based on factors such as:
A) What is missing in your current innovation process that necessitates the birth of an open innovation platform and a digital innovation platform?
B) Why do you want to interact with the outside community? Perhaps you want to get close to a customer and understand their feature preferences and interests like some auto companies have started to do, or perhaps you are short of engineers and need an outside engineering community to work on specific technical challenges that your innovation requires.
C) How will you use the outside flow of ideas in your internal innovation process through an open innovation platform?
D) What do you need to do to make sure your internal organization is ready to engage with the diverse outside community in a meaningful, timely, and productive manner with an open innovation platform and digital innovation platform?
Innovation Process and Types
Your innovation process and open innovation tools may be different depending on the time horizon (short, medium, or long) that you are working with and how radical of an innovation you are shooting for (incremental, evolutionary, radical). These factors will change the dynamics of your open innovation platform your engagement with the outside community and the type of deliverables that are both suitable and realistic.
For incremental innovations, it may be merely enough to open sales and marketing channels and open innovation tools to listen to customer issues, frustration, and suggestions for improvement as they use the product or services. Such Open Innovation Platforms have to be easily accessible for quick input from diverse social media platforms. The key in an open innovation platform or any business innovation platform is to engage and capture customers to share how they are using the product, which features they like, which they don’t, and what is missing that they would like to see.
Factors Influencing Product Innovation Platform
for open innovation platform and product innovation platform, it is important to look at all the technologies that go into the product (entire bill of material) and see which components can be made lighter, faster, cheaper, and stronger so collectively the next evolution of the product can give better overall user experience. Besides customers, it is critical to engage with suppliers and understand what improvements can be made to the entire bill of material. The company should be able to look at all the components (sub-parts) and also continue to encourage new suppliers to propose new ideas and designs that might eliminate some other components or combine a few into one. Innovation at the part level is critical for evolutionary products since the customer may be expecting the same general usage from the product. They will expect the new model to have dramatically better technology considering the rapid changes in the tech industry which is the new normal. If you don’t deliver on this expectation then your competitors will likely have products that are going to be better than your previous generation of the product, which can be tempting even for your loyal customers to switch.
For radical innovations, the purpose of connecting with the outside world has to be much more diverse as explained by Professor Roberto Verganti in his book “Design-Driven Innovation”. Through various examples, no one, including the customer, knows what the radical innovation will look like or which one will be successful.
Hence, communication is more around the innovation of meaning rather than the innovation of product. For example, we all know that 10 years from now homes will be smarter and so will cars but what does a smart home or smart cars mean, and what meaning will be the preferred meaning for customers who will buy such products?
Companies that understand this shifting meaning are in a better position to focus their R&D resources (internal and external) towards building products and services that will deliver on that emerging meaning. If they are engaging with other recognized experts and thought leaders, they end up influencing the meaning that finally takes hold with customers.
Use Cases
A classic example of shifting meaning is what happened with the phones. As mobile technology got more and more powerful, there was an opportunity for a new meaning that Nokia missed and they kept building more and more power phones. Apple saw the opportunity and proposed a new meaning – that of a general-purpose digital mobile device then a wireless and mobile window into all sorts of applications with the phone being only one application. That particular innovation of meaning was the start of the mobile digital revolution and also led to the demise of Nokia.
They understood the new shifting meaning in a complex organizational process that involves people from all departments who are listening and engaging systematically over a long period. The process involves listening, interpreting, and addressing. It is primarily focused on the meaning behind products. Another example is how many products are opportunities for being offered as a service with greater value and convenience to customers. For example, the meaning of buying a car is changing as people start to look at transportation as a service in the broader context including a personal car as one special case.
The car as a service of course would be possible because of all the advances in technology (location, identification, sensors, usage, payments, etc.) that will power such a service-based business model. Over the next 10 years, the meaning of owning a car will change. The company that understands and influences this meaning will eventfully be preferred by customers. They will have a huge competitive advantage since they will be able to channel their R&D to build products and services that will deliver on that new meaning. There are many experiments underway and some are showing more promising results than others. Not one company has yet proposed a meaning that can be considered a home run by any standard.
As you can see from the above discussion, Open Innovation is a very complex social interaction of ideas inside and outside an organization. To manage these interactions between thousands or even millions of people will require sophisticated Information Technology tools. All large IT vendors (especially those focused on Product Value Chain Innovation) are enhancing their existing product suites and introducing new products.
For example, Oracle is addressing this challenge by introducing an Innovation management software tool that gives companies a systematic way to manage and control the innovation funnel. Not one company can offer a complete solution for everything that will need to be implemented within various scenarios of Open Innovation as discussed above.
Suggestions and Tips for Open Innovation Platform
The following are some suggestions that can help you create a wish list for your Open Innovation Platform before you go out shopping for tools:
Understanding External Stakeholders
Know the outside people and communities that you will need to engage with and the primary purpose for exchange. Next, design a User Interface that is natural and easy for them to engage with you. Customers engage differently than engineers who in turn engage differently than people in news media writing about future technology trends.
Internal Management and Engagement
Make sure internally you have the right people assigned to handle and manage the flow of ideas coming in. Unless there is a two-way exchange, people will stop contributing ideas. Make it meaningful and rewarding for people to send in ideas. Give feedback and let them know where their ideas are in the funnel. Such metrics can also be used for a recognition and reward system around ideas.
Strategic Framing of Challenges
Frame your problem and innovation need areas broad enough to allow wild ideas to come into the funnel and narrow enough so they can be acted upon within the timeframe you are targeting. Framing the innovation design challenge is critical for keeping the activity focused on your innovation strategy and goals.
Social Media Outreach
Reach out to your target audience through an aggressive social media campaign so that people use various tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, WeChat, QQ, Weibo, etc. Find out about your Open Innovation outreach and make it easy and interesting to hook into the platform using standard social platform credentials.
Transparent Metrics and Legal Support
Create a clear metric for measuring and rewarding ideas. Ensure that you make it as transparent as possible. When dealing with sensitive IP issues, make sure your platform has access to an internal legal IP resource that can help close such issues in a timely and efficient manner. This way you won’t lose critical technology to your competitors. Many critical IP owners are often two or three engineers and don’t have the resources to engage in a lengthy legal procedure.
Innovative Content Creation for Blogging
At frequent intervals, package ideas that you have already adopted into your upcoming products and share them as blogs through social media channels. These blogs are powerhouses to communicate your innovation of meaning and how you are making sense of the future. Let people connect innovation of meaning with your brand and Open Innovation Platform. It will put you up there in the innovation leader category and the media buzz will follow. That can be done, of course, without revealing your future products.
Workflow Management and Collaboration
Plan for success in terms of the volume of communication activity flowing in and out. Make sure you have the tools to manage the workflow and collaboration. At each stage of the funnel, you will need further human collaboration to narrow down the ideas through elimination or integration with other ideas against some meaningful criteria guiding your innovation strategy. This is where your senior managers and executives come in. They will probably be busy with thirty other day-to-day operational things. Make sure the executives have enough context and necessary information to quickly and easily weigh in on ideas and make go/no-go decisions to keep the funnel moving forward toward a few ideas that are going to be worth prototyping and field testing. If you have thousands of raw ideas in the funnel, they will probably need to be cut down into a hundred working ideas. Don’t delete those wild ideas that did not make sense at this stage. Just park them on the side or hide them from view so you can continue moving forward. The rejected ideas are often great in a different context at a different time. Make sure you have a process of going through rejected ideas systematically once a year or so and reactivate them if the time or context is right.
Leadership Role
Once you have a set of desirable ideas worth pursuing, it is time to finalize the technical feasibility. This is where Oracle’s Innovation Management tool must allow you to organize semi-random ideas into a set of desirable features, requirements and specifications so that you can systematically analyze and discuss them internally with different groups and senior management. Make sure your Innovation Management tool allows you to track and manage the attributes related to technical feasibility and keep track of the emerging product structure details. Building mock and working prototypes allows you to give shape to an idea and visually see what documents and spreadsheets cannot show. If you have an innovation lab setup for this it will be excellent since common resources and tools will already be available for product designers to work with rather than having to organize this activity from scratch. Share these prototypes generously internally and even externally to get feedback. Find the strengths and weaknesses of the concepts. The more alternative prototypes you can build the better. Keep them low fidelity so you can turn them around quickly and at a low cost. They should be thrown away prototypes that are only there to allow people to engage for understanding and giving feedback. The open Innovation Platform should allow you to capture all of these prototype details and social interactions around them.
Revisiting Ideas
Next, it is time to build a working testable version so you can pilot and test in the field. This is where the business model and viability come in as well. Make sure your Innovation Management tool allows you to build such models and test the business model viability under different scenarios.
Various marketing and financial attributes need to be tracked under different assumptions so the tool needs to be flexible. They should also allow data integration with other financial modeling tools so you can do rich and robust analysis to better understand the investment decisions needed to move forward.
Technical Feasibility Assessment
Once you have a set of desirable ideas worth pursuing, it is time to finalize the technical feasibility. This is where Oracle’s Innovation Management tool and product innovation platform must allow you to organize semi-random ideas into set of desirable featured, requirements, and specifications so that you can systematically analyze and discuss them internally with different groups and senior management. Make sure your Innovation Management tool allows you to track and manage the attributes related to technical feasibility and keep track of the emerging product structure details. Building mock and working prototypes allows you to give shape to an idea and visually see what documents and spreadsheets cannot show.
Prototyping and Feedback
According open innovation platform, if you have an innovation lab setup for this it will be excellent since common resources and tools will already be available for product designers to work with rather than having to organize this activity from scratch. Share these prototypes generously internally and even externally to get feedback. Find the strengths and weaknesses of the concepts. The more alternative prototypes you can build the better. Keep them low fidelity so you can turn them around quickly and at a low cost. They should be thrown away prototypes that are only there to allow people to engage for understanding and giving feedback. The open Innovation Platform should allow you to capture all of these prototype details and social interactions around them.
Piloting and Testing
Next, it is time to build a working testable version so you can pilot and test in the field. This is where the business model and viability come in as well. Make sure your Innovation Management tool allows you to build such models and test the business model viability under different scenarios.
Portfolio Management
Various marketing and financial attributes need to be tracked under different assumptions so the tool needs to be flexible. They should also allow data integration with other financial modeling tools so you can do rich and robust analysis to better understand the investment decisions needed to move forward.
Strategic Planning and Analysis
For a large company, there may be hundreds if not thousands of ideas flowing through the funnel. Open innovation software is critical for that. The Innovation Platform tool must allow you to manage an overall portfolio to answer questions such as:
- Do I have enough interesting ideas coming into the funnel to energize the pipeline necessary for an open innovation platform?
- Where are the bottlenecks and chocking points in the pipeline?
- The innovation platform inquires about bottlenecks and issues in the pipeline. is my overall portfolio balanced between short, medium, and long term as well as between incremental, evolutionary, and radical innovations?
- Who are the key people and companies in the innovation platform that are critical for success during the next three years? I can form closer ties with them to ensure efficient execution.
- How much revenue can I expect from new products in the next three-year horizon?
- What are some core technologies that are common across many potential products in the innovation pipeline or product innovation platform? I will need to treat these as core platform technologies and put our best minds to work on these projects. If these core technologies belong to outside companies or people, perhaps I need to think about a company or license acquisition to ensure we have a competitive advantage against competitors. Open innovation software takes into consideration everything.
Conclusion
For companies to embark on an innovation strategy journey, two tools are crucial to make sure the process is flexible and manageable. The first is the Open Innovation Platform to engage with the outside world. The second is the internal Innovation Platform to drive the funnel so you convert ideas into meaningful products and services which will generate revenue and profits for the company. These two platforms have to be tightly coupled so that they complement and amplify the external and internal resources within your innovation ecosystem. With the right tools in place, it can free up your employees so they can focus their human talent on making a connection between wild ideas and product concepts – which address human needs in both new and novel ways (something computers cannot do) rather than wasting time tracking and organizing information (which computers can do better than humans).
FAQs
Open innovation refers to a collaborative platform fostering creativity and problem-solving by incorporating external knowledge and diverse perspectives. While it shares similarities with an engineering innovation platform, the former emphasizes a broader ecosystem of talent through crowdsourcing and collaboration tools.
Implementing an Open Innovation Platform without a clear purpose and strategy can lead to internal confusion and the inability to manage the influx of ideas. It may also harm the brand image due to public frustration, which can spill over into social media. A well-defined strategy ensures effective engagement with external communities and aligns with overall business goals.
The level of openness depends on factors such as the need for innovation, sensitivity areas, and strategic goals. Leaders should assess what’s missing in their current innovation process, why they want to interact with the outside community, and how external ideas will be integrated into the internal innovation process. This evaluation ensures a purposeful and tailored approach to openness.
Each functional area can participate in the open innovation process, but leadership must create a strategy based on factors such as identifying gaps in the current innovation process, reasons for engaging with the outside community, and the integration of external ideas into internal processes. This ensures a cohesive and meaningful engagement across various departments.
The time horizon and type of innovation significantly impact the dynamics of an Open Innovation Platform. For incremental innovations, channels for customer feedback are crucial, while evolutions require engagement with suppliers to enhance the entire bill of material. Radical innovations focus on the meaning behind products, necessitating diverse communication with external experts and thought leaders to influence emerging meanings.
Empathy is crucial when managing communication with customers on an Open Innovation Platform. Internal staff must understand not just what customers are saying but also their feelings, thoughts, and actions concerning products. Implementing tools like Design Thinking empowers employees to deeply empathize, fostering a more meaningful and productive exchange of ideas.
Companies should frame their problem statements and innovation needs broad enough to allow for diverse ideas to enter the funnel while remaining focused on their innovation strategy and goals. The framing of innovation design challenges is critical for keeping activities aligned and ensuring that the ideas contribute meaningfully to the organization’s objectives.
Organizations should not delete rejected ideas but rather park them or hide them from view. These rejected ideas may hold potential in a different context or at a different time. A systematic process should be in place to periodically review and reactivate rejected ideas if the time or context becomes suitable.