Open Innovation in a closed world
When the term Open Innovation was first coined by Henry Chesbrough in 2003 in his book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology” the world was on the peak of the just-entered-the-new-millennium optimism.
The financial crisis of 2008 in conjunction with big tech exponential acceleration positioned well the OI approach in the minds of many executives across all kinds of sectors.
The key concept is that the old model of taking ideas to market can no longer work in a closed, sterilized environment, when there are so many brilliant minds out there.
Any organization, from a large corporate to a public sector legal entity, must open to external stakeholders and in particular to the most creative communities to reap the benefits of collaborative idea creation and business opportunity exploration.
The slide below depicts the paradigm shift using the ubiquitous funnel instrument as ideas move towards launch.
Some of the most established ways to achieve the interaction between the inside-world of corporate innovation and the outside-world have been organising so called “Hackathons”, a short sprint of development based on challenges usually lasting 48 hours during a weekend.
Corporate executives acting as mentors and jurors in the process can exchange experience with startups and teams that aspire to become startups, so this mix of mindsets and approaches gets a chance to be tested.
If there is a fit, usually the next step is a more structured acceleration or incubation phase where the two sides agree on a Proof-of-Concept first pilot before deciding to go live and sign a commercial deal.
Complementary strengths are obvious.
The experience of gathering members of the ecosystem to meet and work shoulder-to-shoulder over a weekend or for a longer 3 to 6-month period inside an acceleration program breaks the barriers and increases chances for ideation and alignment.
Now what happens when this is no longer the case in the post-Covid-19 world? How Open Innovation can work with physical distancing? Is it still relevant for organizations of all types to follow an Open Innovation approach in a closed world?
While measuring the full impact is premature, some first signs show that fully online collaboration is feasible and can still bring many benefits for all sides.
There are points, such as accessibility to talent beyond geographical limitations, where online is quite more effective than offline processes.
At Crowdpolicy we had the experience of organizing a fully online hackathon early on during the first weekend of April 2020 aiming to bring solutions for combating Covid-19 in Greece. The results of this initiative which will continue in more rounds can be found here:
Then there was the massive EUvsVirus Pan-European Hackathon organized within a very limited timeframe for this kind of scale that attracted more than 20.000 participants during the last weekend of April 2020.
Very impressive stats and results can be found here:
Having hands-on experience as a team coordinator and a member of the National Curation group for Greece, I’m increasingly positive that fully digital Hackathons can work.
More digital-savvy people are open for collaboration than ever.
Mature tech platforms are now reliable and scalable.
Collaboration tools are more advanced than ever.
Communicating via video calls has slowly become a norm.
The foundation for establishing meaningful business interactions during OI programs is strong in the cloud era.
And this is the essence of Open Innovation. Even in a closed world.
