The benefits of Open Innovation or as I call it Open Collaboration between inventors, companies, brands, distributors are clear.

The hard data — companies that openly collaborate realize as much as a tripling of innovation success rates, 85% improvement in R&D output and a 50% reduction in capital spending  (P&G results).

The challenge is today in most cases Open Innovation is the focus of specialty groups within supply chain, buying groups or skunk works that report directly to the CEO.   It’s not done by the mainstream brand managers, product developers, sales or product supply teams.

The problem is the “central control” groups can never understand the needs and nuances of each business.  Instead of exploring for collaborations openly – the centralized teams have discrete and specific requests to search for.

This neutralizes the value of open innovation mining.  As the most successful open innovation manager at one leading company told me “if we really knew what we were looking for – we wouldn’t need open innovation.   My success is because I simply go looking for new ideas and smart inventors – and then make a market for it inside my company – instead of trying to go shopping for solutions.”

The Planet Eureka! innovation network we’ve created was designed for use by everyone.  It makes it easy for anyone in any department to understand and connect with technologies and inventors.

Interestingly – at a number of companies the “command and control” open innovation groups have seen it as a threat to their authority.   Direct quote “Doug, it would be chaos if every marketing and product development person was looking for new ideas.  We need to control the flow.”    Fortunately the web is open – and old world mindsets like this will soon be extinct.

As Deming said “Command and Control turns the company into a corporate prison” – or as I say “Corporate Communism must be overthrown by the people.”

Filed under: Doug's Soap Box, Science of Creativity