The impact of digital innovation changes the innovation paradigm significantly.

Organizations can stay digitally closed in their innovation activities, moving beyond simply developing innovation solutions themselves into a connected (closed) network, where the platform becomes the enabling force and those that join share common ground or purpose but are pursuing separate value propositions that required this ‘extended’ collaboration to achieve this position.

These ‘closed systems’ can give a level of competitive advantage but these are increasingly transitory depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the eventual value proposition. Collaborative platforms are clearly the way to go to open-up innovation that allows more radical and complex solutions to be provided.

We will see a new wave of open digital innovation So why do I say that? There are four aspects where technology will trend towards open (see more on that here: http://digitalsocial.eu/) to exploit our connected world. We will be looking to extract an ever-diminishing competitive advantage as the world just keeps speeding up, pushing us as technology continues to run ahead of our capacities to assimilate it.

So we need to keep moving towards open and complex solutions that require us to become increasingly collaborative to let (many) others help us on the way as partners so as to exploit the competitive advantage that is increasingly transitory.

1. Firstly, open networks – those innovative combinations of networks, which continue to evolve new solutions and infrastructures and are very rich in bottom-up potential. These open networks are extremely dynamic and diverse, full of experimental pioneers and as they work at the edges, the rest of us need to stay connected, as these open networks will continue to suppliant what we have on a constant, evolving basis.

2. Open data – This explosion of new types of data analytics and machine learning means we all will eventually have access to analyse vast amounts of data. As we innovate ways to capture, use, analyse and interpret open data coming from multiple sources we need to find its value for what we do. Open data policies will emerge from government, local authorities and (eventually) within our business organisations. We will need the tools and skills to interpret all the open data coming into us from people, our networks and simply from the environment and world we belong to.

3. Open knowledge – We are in need of co-production of new knowledge. We need to learn more about adaptive capacity where you acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit knowledge from its potential to a realized value. There is a greater trend to mobilization based on open content, open-source and open access so we can understand, absorb and make comments (or not). Knowledge must be allowed to flow openly to allow us to grow individually. We will see an increasing mass-scale of social collaborations. We are all moving to blogs, wikis, social networking and hundreds of collaborative platforms of choice. These are beginning to manage (even take over) our lives. As we disseminate the knowledge we get growing cross-fertilization.

4. Finally, Open hardware – The more we become curious, the more we want to build ‘something.’ More and more open-source hardware is permitting us to build upon it. We are increasingly having the potential to study, modify, make, extend, distribute or design so these modifications take on our identity. The use of ready to use components and materials, tapping into established processes, open infrastructures, allowing unrestricted content and plugging into open-source design tools gives us all as individuals the ability to create something. The more we are moving towards a more open-source internet of things to design, use and value within our lives.

All of this digital technology is seemingly all about getting to know. Our privacy and security concerns are getting caught up in this, for a time it will slow the pace down but I fear the ‘genie is out of the lamp’ constantly asking you your next connected wish before you see another useful technology lamp to ‘rub’ for more wishes. Over time privacy and security will take on a different meaning and the pursuit of traceability and transparency will take their place as our concerns.

Why will this change – simply because we need everything to be open?
As we become more open, more willing or coerced into trying the latest thing, the internet of things will increasingly determine our behaviours.

There are four powerful enablers that are working away at making a significant change in our lives. As we connect more, we change our ways of working, our thinking, our habits and our abilities to earn a living.

• The more personal devices will keep us in the anytime / anywhere state, demanding the services it provides will give us increased innovating opportunities.

• IoT will offer those (expected) guarantees of access into the physical world. Digital will fuse more with the physical and we have to keep open to explore this.

• Then we have the internet of people, all busy connecting and communicating that will promote the internet as the fundamental channel of choice, into user communities of selected groups, or broader communities that we will rely increasingly upon for data, content, services and increase our ‘digital currency’ to earn a living.

• Lastly cloud computing allows an infinite array of connecting apps, and your personalised virtual infrastructure, where you can receive, deliver, create and distribute growing services over the internet, extending your ability to innovate to a much wider market.

Yes, the world of innovation is changing, digital is changing it significantly.
We felt open innovation was a big enough deal, perhaps it was in its day but as digital implants itself into our lives, into our organizations, into our societies more and more.

We must decide if we stay open to allow it in or try to close it off and channel it in ways that will provide value, but those will be transitory moments before we need to go back and open up again.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Our longer term winner is clearly open digital innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well then, are you going all digital on me from your innovation activities?

Take care, it does change our view of the world, as we look inside-out or even, outside-in

So there we all were, getting really very comfortable in our open innovation activities, learning to collaborate and co-create outside our organizations.

Even our management has finally got “open innovation”.

We are encouraged and allowed to collaborate outside our four walls of the organization as the penny has finally dropped that “not all knowledge resides within the company”.

We had worked through some of the cultural stuff, shifted around the team who like to collaborate, pushing others less collaborative to the back; the conflict points, we had established the process, practice and tools.

We even have our legal teams on board helping sort out all the conflicting positions that open innovation can mean when it comes to dividing up the IP spoils and even had our leadership tuned in, singing our praises and even (heavens forbid) getting engaged in the process.

When the world shifts, we all need to as well, or we get left behind.
Then suddenly the world shifts on its axis once again, everything seems to be digital. The buzz is big data, analytics, smart mobility, and social media, with lots of talk of interconnected devices giving us the next big paradigm in innovation growth.

So will my innovation portals, my collaboration platforms, my idea capture tools or my crowdsourcing and patent scanning techniques all get thrown up into the air or are they going to be squeezed into this new digital pot?

Many are struggling with the sudden talk of big data; all of it flowing into the organization when many of us were simply struggling with what we thought was big enough data being generated already.

What and where is this digital actually going and what does it mean to us?

How fast will the digital revolution come into my organization? Are any of us ready for this latest onslaught? Do we have the new skills all of these digital technologies need? Does this mean I have to talk again to the IT department?

So many questions are bubbling up on digital technology; it is going to be hitting us like a tsunami, at a potentially destructive force. There is a time to find the high ground and I’d recommend to start now.

We will be faced with two choices as my ‘open’ thinking here

We will either go from open innovation to open digital innovation or we will revert back to closing up and trying to manage all this data within a closed system or network. So is this another moment for open vs closed debate, just with digital included to make it ‘open digital innovation’ or, is it closed digital innovation?

Will there be a difference? I think so.

First we will need to debate the ‘network effect’. Metcalfe’s Law “that the value of the network is in proportion to the number of members squared”.

In other words, the evaluation of how strong a network is, will be determined by the numbers connected. As we use technologies and leverage the internet the greater our intelligence will flourish. So open digital or closed digital?

Exploiting the ‘digital effects’ will be determined by the value it can generate. The more open the data infrastructure is, the more the networks and open hardware can collect, generate information, extract actionable value and increased awareness. So open digital or closed digital?

The excitement that digital is expected to generate in delivering the insights of anticipated solutions and pointing ‘us’ is being ‘dangled’ in front of us.

Are we ready, can our organizations cope?

The more ‘everyone’ connects on the internet through the Internet of Things (IoT) then we will be experiencing even more of a bigger transformation. They forecast 5 billion additional people will connect to the internet globally in the next ten years all wanting to ‘give voice’.

Today we talk of ‘high-speed’ I just wonder on when ‘the day the internet broke’ or simply taking speed and putting it is greater context such as ‘managing in open innovation ecosystems to deliver the speed’.

So which way will we go? Open digital innovation or closed digital innovation?

Either into the creation and consolidation of monopolies of knowledge (closed digital innovation) or open ecosystems to foster grassroots ideas, social innovation to resolve growing problems, entrepreneurship or giving the nimble and savvy business organizations the chance to pull even more ahead in exploiting.

Each is going to demand a massive mobilization of resources, internally and externally. The digital world is more enmeshed in our lives; we are living in more ‘real-time’ than ever before that continue to form a universal distributed intelligence. We are all going to keep learning new skills and tools for understanding all this ‘collective intelligence’ coming at us.

The battle for control lies in the power of digital understanding

Question: Are we going to have a battle of competition based on open standards so as to benefit from interoperability between this data streaming in, the multiple devices we have, and the growing services and networks that we require to manage it all?

Question: Or will we see some attempting for lock-in engagements, striving for anti-competitive dynamics to steal competitive advantage and undermine swaths of ‘not able to compete or ‘far too slow to see it coming?

Question: Will we see platforms that we can all sign up and join in that link all the value chain providers, each seeking their part of the value chain that will allow for replicable, scalable and sustainable solutions or shall we stay narrow in scope and ambition?

Can we afford to, if the world is connected outside our window, we continue to struggle to lookout?

Whatever, digital feeding innovation will reign supreme in the forthcoming years or will it?

We are exploring all the current trends in digital technology promising to give us embedded intelligence in our devices, social activity, plenty of social and business platforms to join in and lots of mobility to keep us on the move, we seem to be heading off into a new world where digital will reign supreme.

All this data streaming in, either open or closed in collaborative management seems to be promising a wave of new innovation opportunities.

We have to decide which digital technologies are good for us and, are we throwing open the innovative digital doors or simply limiting it down, trying to control it for our sole competitive advantage?

Presently we are seeing the race to build platforms – but are they (really) open or (selectively) closed?

Closed innovation allows for a clear network of like-minded and determined organizations to work on their purpose-built platform to specifically deliver value propositions.

GE has been developing their proposition around the Industrial Internet where sensors within all their products (trains, aircraft engines, wind towers, MRT scanners etc), and these sensors will provide back the data that can analyse performance, so the customer can determine the scheduling of maintenance, improve planning and logistics etc.

They make the value proposition of offering a return of 1% as their stated claim, and already have a one billion dollar business since scheduling maintenance is a significant economic undertaking of downtime, resource planning and scheduling.

That is a closed innovation platform as it serves GE customers, and this is being sold as a value-added service.

Already they are looking to open up the platform for others but it seems not in competition to GE, so others can utilize the resources and expertise being built up for GE to build their ‘closed’ system of innovation for their competitive advantage but will this limit digital evolution or allow it to be evolved through our growing ‘maturity’ to handle it?

So will we see open digital innovation or a specific type of closed? I’ll give you my best bet in the next post, on what will eventually win.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Are you going all digital on me? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One such list I compiled from mainly two sources on roadblocks to open innovation. The main source was Dr Brian Glassman. He wrote a paper “Open Innovation’s Common Issues & Potential Roadblocks with Dr Abram Walton. (http://www.innovationtools.com/PDF/OI_issues_and_roadblocks.pdf) and different thoughts that I found as well worked through.

The other source to make up this list was from P&G’s experiences gleaned from different sources. Together I feel they make for a solid list of roadblocks or issues to think through. Let me share these:

Firstly the core need or use of open innovation

1. Generating ideas for new products and services
2. Solve technical problems that are vexing or too complicated or expensive to solve internally
3. Co-development of difficult problems, services, products, technologies

Issues & Potential Roadblocks

1. Internal buy-in- quick wins, types of motivations- how to tackle this?
2. Changing the culture is a big challenge. Shifting from inventing everything internally and owning all the IP to an open culture, with shared risks and rewards is a huge leap. You find that not everyone embraces open innovation at the same speed, or to the same degree.
3. It is important that employees realized that any open innovation was not another name for downsizing and outsourcing jobs but instead, a strategy to ensure sustained business growth for the Company. Leveraging open innovation as a way to increase capacity for our internal researchers makes sense as a key message
4. Recognise early  to concentrate on what we do really well internally and look to partners externally in instances where they can either do better or faster to bring products to market more quickly
5. Build rewards and recognition into the career development related to open innovation recognising its value to the organization and its learning.
6. Change the mindset of open innovation as a ‘threat’ to open innovation as an ‘productivity enabler’.
7. You have to champion the early adopters. Whether it’s an individual or a business, you take those who are on board, passionate, and have embraced open innovation and you make heroes of them to the rest of the business.
8. It’s a process that begins with networking and building relationships and grows into productive business transactions that benefit both participants as well as consumers.
9. Approaching ‘partner understanding’ in a similar way to consumer understanding. To become the ‘partner of choice’ requires being outwardly focused to understand partner’s needs, concerns, expectations, goals, etc. and finding ways to delight them at the first moment of truth (their initial contact as a potential partner) and the second moment of truth (during the collaboration).
10. And at the monetary level, ensuring that partnerships are truly a win/win for both sides.
11. Set out to coach internally and ask the question “Would you sign for either side?” In doing so, we increase the likelihood of repeat partnerships. And we build a solid reputation as a true partner of choice.
12. Establishing trust with your open partners- reputation, honesty,  avoiding overly aggressive negotiations, prompt and clear communications, IP openness
13. Intellectual Property-  complex and often central, full ownership tussles, limited disclosures, fair split on inputs, commitments, resources, capital
14. Corporate lawyer blocks- core beliefs in potential conflict with open disclosures, at what point involve them, oral agreement stage or before, required buy-ins
15. IP category blocks- the class the IP falls in, open, who benefits, competitive positions, weapons of defence to block future options, issues of internal security
16. Payment systems- typical payment process large vs. Small, how and when to pay, pay on milestones, be clear on this
17. Communications- central capability in finding, evaluating and working, the types of person as communicators, champions, connectors, the mindset needed and determination required to break down barriers, knowing the different channels to answers to unblock.
18. Structure of the initiative- a web page of officers, connection details, spamming, unlisted hot numbers, availability and response mechanisms, extroverts, mindset based on a deep desire to connect and communicate, proper, active and trustworthy statements of intent
19. Clear & Stated Agreement Established at the Beginning of the Relationship- establish a clear understanding and broad agreement on vital issues, the ‘up front work’ is critical
20. Clear, Descriptive and Motivating RFP- these communicate the corporate needs to the open innovation network. RFP’s usual sections- opportunity area, problem statement, detailed information where possible (costs, pressures, priority, value, numbers) and anything felt to be relevant to improve submissions. Not too tight, not to lose, easy to read, well structured and financial rewards potential options
21. Limiting Participation – often more work examining the proposals than resources to complete this. Pre-qualify partners through screening, widen criteria if needed later.
22. Unfocused open innovation programmes- go off in any direction, benefits of quick wins, create wish lists of clear wins, based on core area of use (application), great potential areas, vexing problems, high value solutions, finding valuable new capabilities or new resources
23. Facing the unknowns- no journey is without problems, face these squarely on and admit to shortcoming quickly. We are no longer islands of knowledge, we need to learn.
24. The skills needed to succeed are their adaptability to change, entrepreneurial skills, sensible risk taking behaviours. Being able to identify and remove organizational roadblocks to open innovation. Continual questioning of status quo and looking ahead to find new solutions. Actively working internally to drive culture change, while remaining laser focused externally at consumer needs
25. Encourage a more active involvement in real life work settings vs. in the lab.
26. Provide settings to give as many people as you can real life business experience, and provide jobs to students and faculty in different imaginative ways. A great example could be strong university collaboration partnerships that over time work really well.

These do provide a good working-through type of list, to help get you into a better open innovation shape and be more prepared to tackle issues as and when they come up.

Hope you find it useful, I did

The post Managing different open innovation roadblocks first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.