Open Innovation? No, thank you!

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: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4212555/Intel-pumps-100M-into-new-research-model 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

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