How to Set up an Open Innovation Program

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So you thought crowdsourcing was a recent business innovation? Think again!

As far back as 1714, the British government set up the Longitude Prize, a huge cash reward for anyone who could devise a simple, accurate way to measure a ship's true position at sea. The competition was designed to tap into the ideas of independent inventors and experts to solve this historic navigation problem, a process known today as crowdsourcing.

The Longitude Prize's main award of ?20,000 ? equivalent to $3.74 million today ? was never paid in full, but smaller amounts were given to people whose work made a valuable contribution to finding the solution.

The prize and crowdsourcing are forms of "open innovation," a concept that says the best ideas are rarely concentrated in a single organization. In a business setting, it means that companies should consider looking beyond their own walls to speed up their research and development processes.

In this article, you'll learn what open innovation is, and find out how to set up an effective exchange of ideas.

What Is Open Innovation?

Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas Business School, coined the term "open innovation" in his 2003 book, "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology."

He says open innovation has two facets: "outside in" and "inside out." "Outside in" is when an organization brings external ideas and technologies into its processes, and "inside out" is when it shares its ideas with others. Both the internal and the external flows of information can accelerate the innovation process.

Your business model may determine what knowledge and information you choose to bring in, or share with others. And your model can be based on some of the conventional approaches for acquiring technologies, such as licensing, joint research and development, and crowdsourcing....



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