Written by Alexander Schroll | 27 February 2009

Tags: Chesbrough | Closed innovation | Definition | Open Innovation

In a recent blogpost, Nico Macdonald emphazies that Chesbrough is painting a black and white picture, by contrasting the old, closed innovation model with the new, open innovation model.

He uses some examples from the Palo Alto region, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to state that "In reality, the closed innovation model has never really existed...". According to Nico, companies have used technology insourcing and outsourcing already 30 years ago. Hence, Open Innovation is not a new phenomenon. And even if open innovation exists now, this doesn't necessarily mean that closed innovation existed.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 27 February 2009

Tags: Conference

Another Open Innovation conference is coming up in June 09:

The 7th Annual International Open and User Innovation Workshop will be held in Hamburg from June 3rd till 5th, 2009. The workshop is organized by Cornelius Herstatt, Christian Lüthje, Christina Raasch, and Christoph Stockstrom. Herstatt and Lüthje are already known in the academic community for their academic work on User Innovations (Lüthje et al. 2002, Lüthje Herstatt 2004, Lüthje Herstatt von Hippel 2005).

Although there is still no workshop program, I have already registered.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 26 February 2009

Tags: Biotech | GlaxoSmithKline | Intellectual Property | Outbound | Patent | Pharma | Utilize

We know that there are basically two ways to adopt open innovation in a company:

• The inbound process, which exploits external sources of innovation in order to integrate external know how and innovation into the company.
• The outbound process, which utilizes external innovation opportunities with internal capabilities and resources.

Because leveraging external resources is extremely popular at the moment, the outbound process often is forgotten. But remember how many patents and license are not used in many companies (according to Chesbrough). The example of GlaxoSmithKline shows how to leverage unused intellectual property.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 23 February 2009

Tags: Acrobat | Community | Crowdsourcing | Initiative | Intel | Sun

Currently, many companies try to tap external resources through (open innovation) communities. Every company tries to create their own initiative and their ownportal. I think, that's the wrong way. Getting attention from potential "innovation solvers" is increasingly getting difficult.

However, companies think that they are better off by establishing their owninitiatives. The war for customer attention in our attention economy has begun!

In my last post I introduced Toyota's new open innovation initiative "Toyota Why Not". Here are more recent examples of open innovation initiatives. Namely from Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Acrobat.