Open innovation (OI) can be a powerful approach for organizations to find groundbreaking ideas, develop new products and solve difficult problems. But not every company that engages in OI enjoys the same success; there are many reasons why.
I have been involved in hundreds of open innovation projects — I have seen huge successes and, of course, many failures. From those failures, patterns emerged from fundamental mistakes organizations made, outlined below. By avoiding these mistakes, you will undoubtedly excel in your next open innovation endeavor!
1. Don’t Do it Once
Just like any good investment strategy, open innovation works best using a diversified portfolio approach. You can expect that some OI endeavors will bear fruit, some will fail, and a small number of them will become outstanding achievements. The most successful ones will disrupt technologies, products and even entire businesses—happening more and more often today. They will be the case studies that you will point to build additional support for your OI program internally.
Instead of running one considerable, high value “make it or break it” project, run ten small “Agile OI” challenges. For example, you could take your large project and break it into ten smaller ones that make up the larger problem components. By deconstructing your more complex problems into multiple simpler ones, you will most likely guarantee success. Additionally, the learnings you gain from the less successful OI competitions will give you valuable insight on how to modify your approach going forward. That way, all lessons learned are applied to your next moonshot!
2. Don’t Do it Yourself
A solid open innovation program can uncover new opportunities, develop creative solutions and has the potential to change how you think about a product or technology ultimately. Still, there can be many moving parts to making it work well. Some questions you should reflect on are:
- Who is your audience and how will you find them? Can you create your own crowd? More importantly: how do you keep them engaged and interested in helping you achieve your goals?
- How can you best incentivize your ecosystem or your partners without leaving too much on the table?
- What are the legal hurdles that you will need to solve? What are the best practices for developing agreements to use with OI partners or a crowd of experts?
- What are the IP considerations and how should it be structured?
- What is an appropriate reward to offer to ensure your OI project has the greatest chance of attracting the right players?
Your company relies on its domain expertise to create technologies and successful products and services. But, unless you have extensive experience in open innovation, you can expect some significant challenges that could lead to costly mistakes. Rely on the experience, expertise and counsel of a trusted OI partner who can help you with all the details so you can focus on what you do best—capitalizing on the great ideas that result from your open innovation projects.
3. Don’t Work with the Wrong People
Open innovation can be different, mysterious, wonderful, and even threatening to some people. Some will be convinced that it will fail even before it starts, and some will even actively try to make it fail. I suggest you keep these ‘Debbie Downers’ as far away as possible from your OI projects.
The level of engagement, motivation and creativity that your team exhibits while engaging with your crowd or OI partners will directly affect the engagement, motivation and creativity that you get back from them—reciprocity. If your team is excited about the possibilities, is responsive, answers questions quickly and demonstrates that they are “all in” on the project, you will inspire others and get better results.
One of the greatest indicators of an OI project’s success is the perceived level of engagement and enthusiasm on the internal project team. By choosing your project team carefully, you will set the project up for success. You can start by simply asking them what they feel the chance of success will be for the project—that will give you an indicator of whether they should be involved.
4. Don’t Forget About the Most Important Part: Following Through
Your OI project can result in excellent tangible outcomes. However, if it does not result in something actionable such as a new partnership, a new product, a patent, or some other outcome, the project will (in most cases) die.
When ideas are developed internally, the contributors are always more invested in making it happen by pushing it forward, even when it encounters setbacks like budget issues or strategic changes. In contrast, open innovation is different: the idea comes from outside of the company. That drive to keep it alive might be absent due to the disconnection. What this means is that without a rock-solid plan and effort to help push the project to the finish line, it could very well die on the vine as soon as it hits a major obstacle.
By planning and having one or more individuals take ownership of an idea or project from the beginning to the end, it will help you avoid this problem; find a true innovation evangelist! The critical step is to ensure a seamless transition from your external ecosystem to the internal owner and team, who will be tasked to take over the delivery.
5. Don’t Choose the Wrong Audience
Who do you need to engage with to get your problem solved? Is it a crowd of experts, or is it university researchers? But then, you have a massive database of customers and suppliers; maybe they are the best people to engage? The audience that you choose is critical to your project’s success. You need to ensure that it is laser-targeted—not only so that you receive the best insights and solutions but also to reduce the unnecessary. If you expect that an answer to your problem is going to come from experts and research scientists, it is imperative to ask that exact audience. Simple right? But too many times, I have seen clients ask the wrong audience (for example, ask their retail customers for scientific solutions), and which left them with an enormous amount of out-of-scope solutions. Your technical peoples’ time is valuable, and you want to keep them enthusiastic (see above!); they don’t have to sift through mountains of ideas from the wrong group of solvers.
6. Don’t Overlook the Importance of Framing the Problem
It doesn’t matter how incredibly talented, intelligent and capable your audience is; if you ask them the wrong question, you will not get the answer that you need. What you get out of an open innovation project will be directly related to what you’ve put in.
Asking the right question to the crowd is no doubt critical for a successful open innovation project. However, understanding your audience and knowing what your audience needs to know about it is essential to crafting an effective problem statement. Here are two questions you can consider:
- Are they all seasoned experts in the technology involved, or do they need a background primer on the technology?
- Would it be useful for them to know what’s been tried in the past?
Put yourself in their shoes and understand what your audience needs to know to solve your problem; you will win from more relevant and insightful solutions.
Here’s a quick tip: find someone from outside your group (or even your company), and have the problem statement in front of them to see what questions they ask. Show the question or problem statement to as many people as possible (considering confidentiality issues, of course), and solicit their feedback and questions. The better you can convey your question, the more chance you will have of getting an answer or solution that you can use. Your trusted OI partner can assist you significantly with this.
If done right, open innovation can be a powerful tool to find new ideas, technologies and breakthrough solutions. Nevertheless, your open innovation stakeholders need to show real success to survive. By avoiding some of these common pitfalls, you and your team will be well-positioned to deliver the very best outcomes from your open innovation program.
About the Author:
Paul Wagorn is an open innovation advocate and is genuinely passionate about technology, innovation, and problem-solving — from uncovering incremental improvements to simple processes to discovering the next best breakthroughs. Paul has more than 20 years of experience in internet technology and over 10 years of experience in Open Innovation. He also has a rich and varied background, from building an online global trade exchange and developing new ways to detect e-commerce fraud to working for the Canadian patent office. Today, Paul is the President of IdeaConnection, the best-in-class open innovation network solver. He has been helping organizations around the world find their next best solutions with IdeaConnection’s exceptional network solvers. Paul is always looking to create new ways of harnessing the power of crowds to implement astonishing new ideas.