Corporates that want to stay ahead of their market, can’t just rely on own internal knowledge and resources. Collaboration across the boundaries of their own organisation is crucial to drive innovation. Open innovation, bringing the outside in, watching and interacting with the surrounding Innovation ecosystem allow to build situational awareness. Collaboration with innovators usually leads to the discovery of totally new concepts, ideas and technologies.
Our CEO and co-founder, Ingrid Willems, has always seen the strengths of open innovation and has tried to bring them into the operation of DataScouts. She discusses in the following article what these strengths mean and how open innovation can help your firm excel in a competitive environment.
In recent years, I have seen a wide range of “Open Innovation” tactics emerging. There is no single solution to innovation. Large companies are opting for a diversified open Innovation policy, that is built around different instruments to stimulate bringing the outside-in:
If corporates want to innovate products, services, business models or processes effectively, they can’t just rely on internal knowledge and resources. A separate and isolated R&D department is no longer sufficient. On the contrary, the boundaries of knowledge and creativity must be pushed.
Open Innovation embraces the outside-in approach, opening the innovation process to external stakeholders. Through open innovation initiatives corporates get access to market information, new ideas, innovative solutions, emerging technologies and creative individuals. The combination of internal R&D with open innovation provides a pathway to sustainable innovation resulting in tangible business results.
Organizations should not hesitate to leverage the added value of people from outside to accelerate their innovation activities. Openness and collaboration have always been a necessity for small companies to stay agile and move fast. Nowadays large multinationals actively invest in building their innovation ecosystem, a network of diverse players eager to collaborate and share knowledge.
The benefits of open innovation, bringing the outside in are hard to deny. Collaboration usually leads to the discovery of totally new concepts, ideas and technologies. Partnerships allow to experiment by using existing technology of other organisations. By calling on partners with additional expertise companies can drastically shorten development time. Moreover, they share the costs if they collaborate with other companies. If not, they fail fast and they fail cheap.
Contributing to an innovation community and having connections with various external actors (such as suppliers, customers, universities and startups,…) results in following benefits:
There is no single solution to innovation. With the DataScouts platform for Ecosystem Intelligence & Operations, we support companies in applying these benefits of open innovation to build situational awareness and become a frontrunner in their market.