l'Open Innovation est bien plus que....

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What Open Innovation is and what it is not

What is 'Open & Collaborative Innovation' ?

An example of 'Open Innovation ' vision: P&G

From e-brands to Open Brands !

- More than ever growth through innovation and collaboration: the current global and financial economic crisis makes it even more obvious that only innovation will generate the last chance for extra growth potential for the leading corporations and brands in the 3 to 5 years to come. Furthermore, given the expected constraints on internal resources and R&D budgets within major corporations and brands, only a new paradigm through innovative partnerships and external collaboration will enable it to happen.
- A fast emerging trend: ‘Open & collaborative innovation’ is a still new yet a fast growing trend as a young management discipline in major corporations.
- A proven strategic model from major brands: leading brands such as P&G (through its ‘Connect & Develop’ partnership platform and program), Nokia , General Mills (G-WIN program), Microsoft (Microsoft IDEES program being deployed internationally), Orange (Orange Partner program), etc. are developing dedicated strategic partnership programs to empower and accelerate their innovation and go to market.
- Innovation, Change and Brand management are merging disciplines: the innovation, change and brand management fields are more and mode linked, interrelated if not overlapping. Some leading advertizing agencies are for instance offering ‘startup connection’ services and Brand Management consulting firms are developing Innovation management services: companies such as Prophet are strongly positioning innovation at the heart of their services. And new breed of consulting firms such as Venture2 or bluenove are emerging.
- The 2.0 effect: Web 2.0 created new ways and trends to manage brands and marketing campaigns such as ‘crowdsourcing’ processes or collaborative platforms bringing user and designer communities together and redefining the frontiers of creativity, art & culture. Bluenove is for instance a partner of the ‘New Life Copenhagen’ project which integrates a set of innovative and collaborative platforms : www.wooloo.org , www.wecollaborate.org, www.kollaboration.biz . The city itself is therefore becoming socially connected and enabling a new proximity marketing.
Mobile 2.0 is also starting to contribute to convergent (web, mobile, tv, content) viral marketing dynamics and advertizing with examples such as mob-it.
Social network based solutions are of course entering the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ thus accelerating organizational changes and culture transformation within corporations.
And major Brands are now using web 2.0 values to define their next generation claims such as the ‘Together we can do more’ by Orange.

How will major brands and advertizing agencies adapt to these new strategies and change management issues mixing convergent Branding, Innovation and Technological skills ?

bluenove is a strategy consulting firm specialized in change management through open and collaborative innovation

A Ripe Time for Open Innovation

Dans mon post précédent je mentionnais que 'dans un contexte de crise dure, l’innovation reste plus que jamais le seul espoir et unique moyen pour les grands groupes de générer des points de croissance à moyen terme.
Et toujours du fait de cette crise, ces grandes entreprises n’auront d’autre choix que de gérer cette innovation d’une manière ‘ouverte et collaborative’ pour justement optimiser leurs investissements R&D et le 'Time To Market' de leurs nouveaux produits.
Elles abandonneront ainsi peut être plus vite qu’elles ne l’auraient fait dans une économie plus ‘confortable’ leur approche d' 'innovation fermée' basée seulement sur leurs capacités internes à innover.
D’une crise à une opportunité ?'
Cet article vient compléter et détailler cette vision.

Article by Jeneanne Rae

Recessions present a good opportunity to collaborate with others on finding, developing, and marketing new ideas

With the economy softening, it's tempting for companies to turn off the lights and shut the door on innovation efforts until things pick up. But while this might look like a smart move, the impact—lost momentum, team dispersion, and wasted investments—is less than desirable.

It doesn't have to be this way. One of the best options for recessionary times, and, some would argue, even in expansive times, is to join forces with another entity with complementary innovation goals. Open innovation is about connecting with others to find new ideas and, often, to co-develop and co-market them.

There are many examples of successful open innovation efforts today. Some take the form of pan-industry innovation networks that share in the risks and rewards of their findings. Others are straightforward co-development projects between strategic players.

Big-Name Players

Here are some current examples: Dossia is a consortium of large employers—including AT&T (ATT), BP, Intel (INTC), Pitney Bowes (PBI), and Wal-Mart (WMT)—that have come together to develop portable electronic medical records for their employees.

Continental Automated Buildings Assn. (CABA) hosts the Internet Home Alliance, a cross-industry network of leading companies such as Whirlpool (WHR), HP (HPQ), Cisco (CSCO), and Intel, engaged in collaborative research to increase use of Internet-based services in the home. Then there's Netflix , which entered into a partnership with LG Electronics to create its own set-top box that will stream movies and other video content.

As you can see, companies can take any number of approaches to open innovation. Mike Docherty of Venture2, an open-innovation consulting firm, says that "Scouting for technologies on the outside is the easy part. The leaders and long-term winners in this area are [corporations such as] P&G (PG) and GlaxoSmithKline , which are going beyond transactions and developing long term co-innovation "relationships" with a group of external partners.

No matter what form these open-innovation efforts take, they offer companies several important advantages over traditional innovation methods. The most obvious benefit is risk reduction —combinations like these share the financial underwriting and require less manpower from each organization than if they'd gone it alone. And that's good news for the chief financial officer who must justify expenditures. But there are also other less obvious benefits:

Higher levels of brainpower applied. As the old saying goes, "two heads are better than one." When companies with aligned interests come together, there is a better chance the problem at hand will be more broadly defined and there is less chance of falling prey to group-think. Such broadly defined problems increase the chances for more holistic, breakthrough solutions to emerge.

Validity. Especially in open-innovation situations that involve a potential provider and a customer, the team has access to field conditions where the essential issues lie. The reference points and shared values that teams derive by working with users on a daily basis helps them zone in on the right problems up front.
Solving the right problems is half the battle of innovation, primarily because working on the wrong problems is so costly. Think foregone investment, market share, profits, and the negative career implications associated with failed efforts.

Quicker to scale. One of the biggest reasons you see entities coming together is to make a given partnership scale up quickly should its efforts be successful. In the Netflix/LG Electronics deal, LG gets ready customers (who it expects will buy millions of its new boxes), while Netflix gets a new media platform that makes it more competitive. This means access to something new to the world that could only have been co-created.

Before initiating and/or participating in open innovation efforts, bear in mind a few important things that need to be aligned from the outset:

Identify partners who share a common vision. Obviously, things can move more quickly if companies already have a relationship, but that is not essential. And sometimes partners can be found in existing networks where you can "meet" and perhaps "date" before getting "married" into a tighter co-development relationship.

For its Digital Kitchen initiative, CABA was able to unite diverse companies including Whirlpool, Bell Canada, Cisco, Direct Energy , and Microsoft (MSFT) to explore the future of the kitchen as the nerve center of the house. If the effort is successful, we should see one or more solutions from some subset of these participants.

Have a big idea with clear goals. Start with a big idea—after all, one of the advantages of open innovation is that a team of companies can accomplish more than one alone. But the effort also needs clear goals and milestones that partners commit to. The members of Dossia dared to breach the mammoth task of creating portable electronic health records with the clear goal of providing them to all of their employees by the end of 2007.

Plan two team workspaces—one physical, one virtual. It's important for the team to meet in person at the outset of the effort, any time the team is working to draw conclusions from their separate analyses or when decisions are being made. Other than that, concentrate on using virtual tools to post and share documents and communicate through regularly scheduled calls.

Manage IP. Managing intellectual property is always the stickiest part of collaborative innovation. The most successful efforts seek to build win-win cultures where both parties benefit in equal measure. Although it should be an expectation to involve lawyers at some point, it is often unproductive to have them driving the early meetings before the parties have had the chance to explore the commercial or investment requirements of the partnership.

Instead, it is often more productive to understand each company's legal culture, its successes and failures in past relationships, and any assets being brought to the table. These things can inform a more casual letter of intent that can guide the early stages until more is known. That document would include the fundamental goals of the united effort, an agreement in principle regarding the resources being brought to the table, and what the expected timetable would be to draw up a more exact picture of the future business relationship. When exploratory activities result in a tangible concept of what the parties will produce and a business model is formulated, then it is time to formalize a business contract.

Create a new mindset. In many cases, organizational culture can be an obstacle to open innovation. Internal groups often perceive open innovation as a code word for outsourcing, when it's really an issue of redefining some internal roles and rethinking your innovation organization much more broadly. Success requires a top-level vision and a lot of internal communication as the initiative is rolled out. But, says Venture2's Docherty, "it's almost magical to watch the transformation as companies actually become more innovative when they learn to partner with creative companies and entrepreneurs on the outside."

Open innovation is a leap of faith. The job of leadership is to make it a short leap. But given how many recent collaborative efforts have been successful, I put open innovation on the top of my list of core competencies for the foreseeable future, recessionary times or not.

bluenove is a consulting firm specialized in changement management through open and collaborative innovation

contact bluenove at contact@bluenove.com

The Mobile 2.0 Tag cloud

Thanks to http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/

Quelles synergies entre Achats et Innovation?

En cette période de fortes turbulences économiques, la tentation va être très forte dans les entreprises, grands groupes ou PMEs, de se crisper et de se concentrer sur une réduction supplémentaire des coûts à court terme.
Mais d’autant plus dans un contexte de crise dure, l’innovation reste plus que jamais le seul espoir et unique moyen pour les grands groupes de générer des points de croissance à moyen terme.
Et toujours du fait de cette crise, ces grandes entreprises n’auront d’autre choix que de gérer cette innovation d’une manière ‘ouverte et collaborative’ pour justement optimiser leurs investissements R&D et le 'Time To Market' de leurs nouveaux produits.
Elles abandonneront ainsi peut être plus vite qu’elles ne l’auraient fait dans une économie plus ‘confortable’ leur approche d' 'innovation fermée' basée seulement sur leurs capacités internes à innover.
D’une crise à une opportunité ? Mais quels liens entre une stratégie Achats et une stratégie d'innovation?
Si l'on analyse les problématiques et les enjeux des Directions des Achats dans la plupart des organisations aujourd'hui, on peut noter désormais après plusieurs plans et programmes successifs d'optimisation :
+ une bonne maîtrise du référencement des fournisseurs et de leur renouvellement
+ le respect par les prescripteurs internes des grilles de référencement mises en place
+ une gestion structurée et efficace des processus d'appels d'offres auprès d'un nombre restreint de fournisseurs pré-sélectionnés
+ une intégration plus forte avec les équipes opérationnelles et les prescripteurs internes

Mais des gisements de valeur et d'économies restent à capter grâce aux synergies à créer entre la gestion des Achats et le Management de l'innovation à partir de la mise en œuvre d'une stratégie d'innovation collaborative et ouverte partagée par tous.

Quelques exemples de pistes d'amélioration et de gains à considérer comme:
- la sélection de fournisseurs innovants non encore identifiés et référencés : comment impliquer très en amont les Achats dès les phases partenariales et pré-commerciales animées par des équipes R&D ou Marketing ou Business Development? Comment s'assurer que les Acheteurs ont accés aux bases de données développées par les équipes Partenariats?
- intégrer une approche d' 'Open & collaborative innovation' dès les phases amont d'un processus d'innovation et de développement de nouveaux services : comment permettre aux équipes Achats de challenger les porteurs de projets sur leur manque d' 'ouverture' vers d'autres partenaires extérieurs (autres industriels, startups, universités ou même clients) ? comment capitaliser sur le savoir faire des équipes Achats pour identifier et sélectionner des partenaires pertinents, pérennes et innovants dès le début d'un processus d'innovation ?
- envisager des processus d'appels d'offres ouverts dans des cas précis et adaptés: comment par exemple intégrer les tendances du 'crowdsourcing' ?
- mettre en place des outils collaboratifs et réseau sociaux d'Entreprise 2.0: comment faire émerger des expertises nouvelles parmi les acheteurs et les associer en mode contributif et participatif sur des thèmes innovants ?
- mobiliser les équipes Achats autour de l'innovation : comment porter l'innovation aussi sur les processus et les domaines Achats autant que sur les services et produits ?
- orienter les objectifs Achats vers de la création de valeur au delà de la maîtrise et de la réduction des coûts: comment permettre aux Acheteurs d'être perçus par les prescripteurs internes comme des contributeurs à forte valeur ajoutée sur les enjeux liés à l'innovation ?
- créer des programmes pro-actifs et structurés autour du Pacte PME: pour les groupes signataires du Pacte PME, comment aller au delà du simple respect d'une charte et d'un quota en développant des programmes de partenariats ambitieux visant à développer des écosystèmes dynamiques et innovants ? comment faire jouer un rôle clé aux responsables Achats dans l'animation de tels programmes ?

Il semble a priori que la gestion des Achats et le Management de l'innovation soient des disciplines éloignées qui n'ont rien en commun.
Au contraire, grâce au développement d'une culture d'innovation ouverte et collaborative dans les grands groupes, le Management de l'innovation devrait être considéré comme une des expertises clés à développer au sein des équipes et des directions Achats afin de déboucher sur de la création de valeur au delà d'une simple logique et image de réduction de coûts.

Et en ces temps de crise comme de croissance, c'est bien plus une culture d'innovation (ouverte et collaboartive) qui doit pénétrer et transformer tous les départements d'une organisation et non pas seulement une culture de maîtrise des côuts.

Pour vous accompagner dans ces réflexions, contacter bluenove à contact@bluenove.com
bluenove est un cabinet de conseil spécialisé dans la transformation par l'innovation ouverte et collaborative

Interview sur bluekiwi TV - L'innovation collaborative, véritable enjeu de conduite du changement

Interview sur bluekiwi TV

Martin DUVAL, CEO bluenove, explique comment créer une attitude participative et faire de chaque employé une force d’innovation pour plus de compétitivité.

Christophe VANDENKOORNHUYSE, Directeur Adjoint DSI Finaref, a mis en oeuvre une démarche de Réseau Social Professionnel pour favoriser l’innovation.

bluenove est partenaire de blueKiwi.