By Daniela Baker
If your company isn’t innovating, it’s slipping behind the competition.
With the Internet and the increasing flow of ideas and information, internal R&D departments alone aren’t always the answer. More than ever, business owners are embracing open innovation to stay ahead.
- Rebuild your corporate culture around open innovation
Open innovation is more than a toolkit, it’s a mindset. You need to make it a core company value instead of limiting it to your R&D department. When you start the transition to an open innovation culture, you want to keep in mind how it will affect management decisions as well as overall company strategy.
- Educate executives and employees
Whenever any cultural change is made, you need to be prepared for pushback from employees at all levels. Moving from closed to open innovation is no exception. Many employees will be guarded with their work. It’s critical to educate everyone from the top down – from executives to the newest entry-level employees.
When discussing the initiative, outline the strategic goals and highlight the benefits of this cultural shift. Embracing outside ideas can boost the bottom line and make the company more productive. That can translate into more profits and higher wages.
You will find this type of openness will encourage employee feedback and will increase willingness to work together to accomplish the goal.
- Organize your intellectual property portfolio
Take stock of your current intellectual property needs before you take on a new approach to your company’s innovation process. Take the time to talk to your R&D department and any other internal innovators to understand what they have developed and what is in their pipeline.
This simple act will avoid duplicating efforts, reduce unfocused external efforts and save you time and money.
- Build great partnerships
Building solid partnerships is key to open innovation. These partnerships will help guide your company to collaborative innovation. Chris Thoen, former managing partner of P&G’s Global Open Innovation office says treating partners well will turn them into evangelists for your company – almost free marketing.
- Encourage innovation internally
If your company isn’t innovation-minded, simply shifting to an open innovation mindset won’t help. You will have very little to offer partners and will struggle with the process. Instead, you will want to launch an internal initiative encouraging employee innovation. Set goals for each department in regards to developing improvements on a monthly basis.
Once your company has embraced innovation, you will be better prepared to approach potential partners to develop collaborative efforts.
- Be clear about what you want out of partnerships
When you’re prepared to cultivate partnerships, you will want to be up front with what you expect from the partnership. This will save everyone’s time. During initial talks, discuss your strategic priorities and what your company will be willing to invest in regards to resources.
You will also want to outline your firm’s strengths and identify the strengths of the potential partner. This will help you both see where there are ability overlaps and gaps so you can determine if this will be a mutually beneficial relationship.
- Build an open innovation community in your industry
You may be in an industry that hasn’t yet embraced the concept of open innovation. This provides you with a prime opportunity to shape the community around your needs.
It may be intimidating to be the company that leads the open innovation movement in your community, but the payoff in new business opportunities, increased profits and even positive public relations is too tempting not to try.
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