Idea and Innovation Blog

When you think of Open Innovation, what exactly is your definition of open? To many, it means including a greater and more diverse community to submit ideas; which is super, providing you have the capacity and capability to absorb, collaborate and process this increased volume; and of course monetize the effort. If you don’t, you may have just created a big problem; or made an existing problem significantly worse.

To many organizations out there, Open Innovation was intended to be the second coming - a panacea for the ills suffered during their inaugural foray into Innovation Management. Yet the way in which some of these organizations have gone about Open Innovation may just be as naïve. It’s reminiscent of the miss-steps made by media companies during the early stages of electronic publishing - where printed format and content were simplistically migrated to bits and bytes, without much consideration for how different the use-case experiences were going to be. Consequently, it wasn’t the lever that the traditional media companies were hoping for – it took several reflective steps backwards, a slew of scrappy upstarts, the abdication of market share and the of loss mega-profits to realize that what this new media really required was…well…something new. The rub: it wasn’t about the media itself - rather it was the new way people were increasingly motivated to use it.

Will the outcome for Open Innovation be the same? 

If you’re going to truly start innovating, why not begin with the process itself? If our own organization wants to do something radically new, why burden our shiny new initiative by using the same old-school methods that created our current innovation log-jam in the first place? The act of innovation itself requires more than just doing the same thing with a new coat of paint. The process requires change because it asks for change. As the bare minimum, upgrading the process for innovation should be a symbolic first step, a pioneering action setting the example for the rest of the organization – an unabashed demonstration of commitment to innovation.

Alas, process is precisely where most organizations get tripped up – leaving what’s left of the new innovation promise to flounder under miss-aligned legacy workflows. No wonder people get discouraged, loose interest and disengage; nothing has really improved.

Process innovation is the critical first step to getting innovation right – it determines who, how, when, where and what your stakeholders will contribute – and in turn also determines the way in which the organization needs to respond. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain.