Open Innovation - a naive primer

Reiterating, Innovation is the delivery of successful products or services to market. In my view Innovation falls into four various distinct classes incremental,  developmental, new approaches, and disruptive and the most cost effective way to deliver is often risk sharing.

Innovation appears in large, small or brand new companies. However it is proven that most innovations comes from small companies with limited resources rather than larger cash rich companies. So how do we deal with these problems?
The most successful innovative companies are often ones who are able to work with outside bodies to develop ideas, provide manufacturing, design or marketing capability. The idea of Open Innovation  is to encapsulate this need to work across organisations with a clear approach to ensure that all parties understand what they are bringing to the party, what is their risk and reward. 

Open innovation is a way of tapping into other's efforts through partnering and is more difficult that doing it all yourself. However in partnership you can use less money and more importantly time getting to market. An example - enterprise with a product based around ICT design for the energy market - budgeted approx 1 million for technology but in partnership with a specialist new company their costs reduced by 90%. Who loses? Only the people who try to keep everything in house.

Worth considering the forthcoming Relationship Management standard BS11000, launching in December. Providing a systematic approach to understanding your own interests, finding a partner and getting results.

Final point if it doesn't make money it fails, so risks shared are more likely to support more innovation, and eventually successful companies.

Purpose and success

October 2010 offers a new start to some of the Civil Service, including me. Just before the silver watch, but who's counting, so now a chance to really push the importance of Innovation to the UK and to build its reputation and output.

 Lets start with defining  innovation as :- the delivery of new products and services to market; not to be confused with invention which is the production of new ideas and prototypes.

My stall has always been that the UK is good, really good at invention and innovation, so we need to celebrate success, whinge a little less and build on our strengths.

The first part is to understand the landscape under 12 key themes of funders, networks, government, infrastructure (physical and virtual), technology transfer organisations, business support, discussion fora, standards bodies, finance, research, learned societies, and industry c.f. UKTI Innovation Map

A good place to start is where you can see all of these people in one place and the Innovate 2010 event on Tuesday 12th October was one of the best. Created by the Technology Strategy Board and centred around their support mechanisms of Knowledge Transfer Networks, Innovation platforms, technology calls, Knowledge Transfer Programmes and others together with industry exhibitors and other innovation organisations. All under one roof and pursuing the possibilities inherent in the UK system.

And a last thought - the UK system is flexible, multifaceted, subtle but above all successful.