Posted July 3, 2019 By: Reda El Alami
On June 20th, 2019 Foresight attended the PDMA webinar Demystifying Open Innovation: Insights from Industry. The agenda consisted of open innovation readiness assessments, roadmaps, and a very informative case study. In order to get the audience on the same page, Dr. Wayne Fisher, Founder of Rockdale Innovation, defined Innovation as the act of “proactively seeking new problems to solve, new ways to solve existing problems, and new ways to implement business building ideas”. In addition he defined Open Innovation as “actively engaging external subject matter experts in the definition of technical problems, identification of potential solutions, and implementation of the best solutions”.
The discussion continued with the Galbraith model, highlighting “what’s important” and “what can go wrong” when installing open innovation in your company, emphasizing the importance of each key element of Organizational Design: Strategy, People, Structure, Rewards, Process; as well as the importance of linking business goals to open innovation projects. As with most product development projects, strong emphasis should be placed on involvement of both the customers and suppliers in all phases of the problem-solving process – problem definition, idea generation, and action planning. We at Foresight always emphasize that it is never too early in your product development process to seek input from your customers, and the same applies to implementation of Open Innovation!
Interested in learning more about Open Innovation? Check out: Open Innovation Essentials for Small and Medium Enterprises. Co-Authored by: Foresight’s Founder, Dr. Phyllis Speser, and VP Business Development, Daniel Satinsky.