Stefan Lindegaard

Here you get my current top 5 list of strong open innovation initiatives and efforts. Your comments and suggestions for other companies are appreciated!

1. Google Glass – for taking an open approach for a disruptive offering

I take it as a clear sign of the changing game of innovation that Google early on recognized that they needed to be open on their efforts with the Glass. Now, they are building an ecosystem that can help develop the apps that will make people buy and use the Glass. Read more in this blog post: Google Glass versus Apple: Different Takes on Open Innovation

2. Microsoft and their Kinect Accelerator program – better late than never

As you will notice, a key element in my suggestions for the best open innovation companies right now is a strong focus towards start-ups.

The...

As I am about to do an open innovation session for a B2B company, I got to think about this question once again and since it works well for a good discussion, let me start out with a couple of remarks:

• B2B companies are actually just as good as consumer goods companies on open innovation, but the latter are just more visible when it comes to open innovation initiatives. A reason for this could be that the products and brands of consumer goods companies are better known and thus we hear more about these companies.

• B2B companies have longer development cycles and thus it takes longer for them to adapt to open innovation.

• B2B companies have more engineers working on innovation relative to fast moving consumer goods companies that have a more holistic approach, which to a higher degree include other functions such as sales, marketing and supply-chain in their innovation efforts. This could lead to a stronger focus on traditional, internal focus for B2B...

Today, innovation happens fast and the outcome is not almost fully prepared for the customers. We see this fairly often within the IT industry (think Microsoft which earned the reputation for “saving” the final debugging for the customers) and this is also the case with mobile payments at Starbucks as you can read about in this article: Starbuck’s Execs Respond to Square Criticism: Innovation Is Messy

In the article, I like this qoute by one of the Starbuck’s executives: “We don’t want to wait on innovation,” Brotman explained. “Because if we waited until we could make it perfect across every single experience of every single store, we would have to move much more slowly for the vast majority of our customers. So we’ve taken an approach that’s not always perfect, but we think it’s the best thing for our brand and customers.”

He also...

Who gets rewarded for innovating in your organization? Is it only those teams that manage to successfully carry an idea all the way through to a lucrative reality? What happens to teams that work on ideas that did not pan out? Are they heckled for their failure or do they also get some positive recognition when (if) they come away with valuable lessons that will help them (and other teams) do better next time around?

As Scott D. Anthony once noted in a blog post, “getting world-class at innovation requires moving beyond rewarding results to rewarding behaviors.” The thing is that when you reward only positive outcomes, people quickly learn to become risk-averse. By only rewarding success, you are apt to end up with a portfolio full of incremental (i.e., safe) innovations. In such a climate, breakthrough innovations, which inherently involve a high degree of risk and oft-repeated failure before...