Open Innovation? No, thank you!

Hi everyone, and happy new year 2011! Expect this year to be more thrilling than 2010 but far less than 2012 for all of us working with technology and innovation. Last year, I argued that by lacking any out of three fundamental characteristics, your organization will fail at any innovation strategy, including Open Innovation. In this post I'll try to provide arguments to why this is so for the first characteristic: competence. By "competence" here I'm referring to good knowledge and hands-on experience on some field of science or technology. Why both? One can grasp a fair amount of knowledge about a given field by e.g. reading research papers on the 'net. After that, speaking to anyone unsavyy in the field shall make her feel like he's in the presence of Zeus himself. You can argue absolutely anything and that person will swallow whatever you throw at her. Meet someone with even light hands-on experience in that field and he'll beat you to dust almo

Hi there! I hope this post finds you all fine and trying to change the ways your organizations innovate. Innovation for innovation, that's how it's done. In this post I'll be analyzing what I by far consider the biggest mistake when introducing the Open Innovation approach into an organization. It can be summarized as "building the house from the roof", or in other words, creating a structure that rests on pure air. Open Innovation, as many other doctrines buzzing around these days, is nothing more -and nothing less- that a unified set of approaches, mostly driven by common sense, aiming to maximize the ROI an organization obtains from innovation activities. But as any other doctrine, it cannot generate innovation by itself. The innovation must be there before the doctrine can be applied. If the doctrine is applied to an organization without building the substrate required for innovation to spur, the outcome shall not only be a lot of wasted effort; it might

Hi there, and welcome back to my humble blog! If you saw my first post you'll realize there's been a change in style. Not that dark anymore, we need a dose of optimism here! In this first entry I'll try to clarify some terms that many people misunderstand in these times of fast change. If not mapping reality in all cases, it will serve as a base for putting things in the right place. Let's start by defining Research . The word probably pops images of mad-scientist-like people wearing white coats and talking by themselves through the corridors. However the term's meaning is very simple: " the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions " (source: The New Oxford American Dictionary). Does Research require a lab? No. Does it require a scientist? Not either. Could you do it at home with the drugs below your wash basin? Yes, since the facts and new conclusions do not have to be unkn

Yes, your eyes aren't tricking you. "Open Innovation? No, thank you!" is the purposedly chosen name for this blog and its first entry. But I'm not as mad as the title might suggest. Please carry on reading and enjoy!. Open Innovation is a relatively recent term coined in the popular book by Henry Chessbrough ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_innovation ). It's a short and enjoyable book that can be read in a couple of days, and I recommend you to read it so you can get a better understanding of what we'll be discussing about in this blog. As for myself, I'm a technologist with 25 years of experience in SW and SW development, both amateur and industrial. I wrote my first Database Management system when I was 16. It was a BASIC program running on a pre-PC machine from Fujitsu that my Dad's brother got me. By then I also built my first LAN by interconnecting it with my good ol' ZX Spectrum through a serial cable I built myself. Yeah, things hav