Open innovation strategies: homing in on opportunities

The current worldwide economic slowdown and ever decreasing budgets have not diminished the need to innovate and bring new products and technologies to market.

On the contrary, it is now even more important to reduce development times and research costs in order to provide additional revenue streams or avoid being overtaken by competitors. The financial woes of Kodak and RIM, the producer of the Blackberry smart phone, illustrate how even previous market leaders in their field can decline when they fail to innovate continually and successfully.

‘Open innovation’ as a concept was coined in 2003 by US business academic Henry Chesbrough. It accepts that there is innovation or expertise outside of your immediate company that could be harvested for your own gains. The challenge lies in identifying those partnerships, collaborations, licensing deals, acquisitions or potential new employees to feed into and accelerate your innovation cycle.

One potential starting point for looking at open innovation opportunities is to visualise a technology landscape by portfolio size and strength coupled with company resources, as afforded by the intellectual business intelligence tool Innography.