Open Innovation

What is Open Innovation? For many large organizations innovation has been the perview of the R&D department or the "creative types" off in the corner. Or for some companies innovation has come from the executive team. Open Innovation is an attempt to break out of traditional practices and remove the limits from where innovation comes from nor how innovations get to market.

One of the first steps companies take in opening up innovation is an attempt to engage the entire organization in idea generation and developing new business opportunities. One of the most famous internal, open innovation processes is Shell's GameChanger. Originally conceived as an internal process to generate new ventures, GameChanger is now opening up to include ideas from anywhere.

As a result, says Harvard Business School Professor Henry W. Chesbrough in his book Open Innovation, the traditional model for innovation--which has been largely internally focused, closed off from outside ideas and technologies--is becoming obsolete. Emerging in its place is a new paradigm, "open innovation," which strategically leverages internal and external sources of ideas and takes them to market through multiple paths.

Nokia Opens Research Center in Silicon Valley
Nokia has opened a new research center, in California's Silicon Valley. To foster open innovation, Nokia also announced a three-year agreement with Stanford University, to develop joint research projects on collaborative mobile computing and applications. Given their close proximity, researchers from Nokia and Stanford will work together using the Stanford campus community as an experimental testing ground for new technologies and services developed by
Nokia Research Center.

Nokia is one company that is riding this wave. Are you? If so, what are examples of how you and/or your company are practicing open innovation?