Åben innovation – Lederindsigt

innovation

Open innovation

Open innovation is about opening up one's innovation process and involving the outside world in rethinking how to get new products and services on the market. Henry Chesbrough, who coined the term, puts it this way:

"Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology"
— Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, 2006.

By Stefan Lindegaard

innovation

Stefan Lindegaard, who is an author, speaker and consultant with a focus on open innovation, sees it as a "mindset" companies should adopt:

"...a philosophy or a mindset that they should embrace within their organization. This mindset should enable their organization to work with external input to the innovation process just as naturally as it does with internal input”
— Making Open Innovation Work, Stefan Lindegaard, 2011

Open innovation has created a new paradigm shift in relation to innovation, and more and more companies today gain benefits by opening up their innovation processes for users, customers, suppliers and in some cases even competitors.

The main advantages

Faster development and launch of new products and services, which can increase revenue, market share and profits
More diversity in relation to innovation, which can result in more innovation opportunities
Higher success rate when launching new products and services due to an overall stronger innovation process and
Less risk, as uncertainty in relation to both markets and technologies is shared with others.

How do you do?

Stefan Lindegaard points out the points below as essential to get off to a good start with open innovation.

Prepare an innovation strategy that is aligned with the company's overall strategic plan.
Clarify why the company needs open innovation and which types of external input are most relevant for the company in the start-up phase.
Create an overview of the most important current and potential business partners and how you can create innovation together with them.
Clarify the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and barriers within the company in relation to introducing open innovation.
Develop a communication strategy that creates a common language and gives both internal and external stakeholders an understanding of this new approach to innovation.
Appoint - and train - employees with the right understanding of open innovation and create an organizational unit that has the opportunity to experiment until the right long-term structure.
Create an innovation culture based on the fact that future innovation takes place in networks and in interaction with external partners.

10 things that block open innovation

Lack of an innovation strategy.
No definition of what innovation is.
Too much focus on internal abilities/skills.
Too much focus on open innovation – alone.
(Optimal to be able to combine open and closed innovation.)
Internal silos are too ingrained.
Too much focus on ideas and too little focus on persons/people.
Lack of a strong innovation culture.
Innovation work focuses on technology or product.
It is always the same people who work with innovation.
Managers and innovation leaders underestimate the speed of change.

Related concepts

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