Open Innovation the right and the wrong way
Hi everyone, and welcome to my humble innovation space (where noone hears me scream ;).
In my last post I talked about what I regard as one of three pillars for a successful Open Innovation strategy: competence. Before talking about the next one, I'd like to show you two real-world examples of Open Innovation and compare them side-by-side.
Recently I received this post from one of my (too many) subscribed Internet newsletters:
Intel is spending 2.5M$ a year in 50 top researchers from Stanford alone. For you lazy guys out there, I'll point out some remarkable points of the Intel-Stanford Open Innovation venture:
- "Unlike past Intel Labs centers, the new investments will be for centers in which Intel provides about four full time staff"
Makes sense, doesn't it? After all, it's not only results that matter. Competence to be gained by Intel engineers on the matters at hand also counts. The first pillar of a successful Open Innovation strategy, remember?
- In addition, Intel business units can request to send staff researchers to the centers to work on specific projects.
Of course. It's the BUs that put the money so they must be up to decide on behalf of their best interest.
- "Intel wanted the research to be open and address what we thought were the fundamental issues, so there has never been any pressure to not do what we think is the best research" (Stanford representative)
Obviously, it doesn't make sense to put top researchers to work on day-to-day product or service issues. What is sought is disruptive innovations arising from base research performed by the University. That's where Intel understands the ROI is. And by "open" they mean "open", i.e. they are in a position to allow other companies to participate and benefit from the results. I can't think of a more open definition of the terrm "open innovation".
- Participants in the Stanford center include some of the top centers of graphics research in the U.S., specifically Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Washington and the Universities of California at Berkeley, Davis and Irvine.
No comments. They don't want workforce. They don't want scholarships. They want the top guys, those able to crank out eye-throbbing, jaw-dropping stuff.
- "The preferred IP policy is researchers, whether from academia or Intel, agree to not file patents and to publish all patentable inventions," said the Intel spokeswoman.
Amazing. Intel is openly (no pun intended) embracing the Open Source paradigm, which in turn sparked off the Open Innovation culture. I can't wait seeing more companies following Intel on this. Can you imagine how our world would be today without Open Source?
As a counterpart I will tell about an apparently similar initiative I know first-hand. One large company has a Technology and Innovation unit which, amongst other tasks, is in charge of the relationship with Universities. Along the last 5 years the company has sunk 1.2M$ in the collaboration with a local university. Top representatives from that university and the company meet every 2-3 years to re-launch the collaboration, there's a lot of smiling and mutual back-slapping, and news (including pictures of course) of the event are published here and there. Of course the top representatives do not know about Open Innovation or the outcome of such collaboration, they just trust their subordinates are driving it the right way. But the facts are that:
- Company staff has not been working back-to-back with university staff on a regular basis. Work has usually been driven by contract and rated by contract fulfillment level;
- Company's BUs have not had the chance to influence or participate in the works;
- No top researcher from the university has been involved;
- The university's lines of research have not been leveraged; rather, the work has been lent to the short-term needs of the T&I unit, and results have not gone further than curiosities (that if tangible results have been delivered at all) put to freeze in a drawer;
I guess you can tell by now which initiative is not poised for success, to say the least. My analysis of the reasons for that bring us back to the three pillars:
- Competence: neither the university nor the company staff have the right competences for the job
- Motivation: motivation for the university is monetary income, motivation for the company is workforce and perhaps some headlines in the news
- Leadership: obviously bold leader(s) able to pick the right people and activities and steer the boat longer term are missing
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