Open to innovation
For a long time, innovation has been an activity internal to the organization and developed as a series of steps carefully managed. This vision in which a company creates, develops and commercializes its own ideas and innovation that can be called "vertically integrated" or "closed" has been called into question during the last decade by more open approach to innovation.
Probably most who have written about the concept of "open innovation" and its implications for the business is Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the University of Berkeley and also directs the Center for Open Innovation at the university. "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology" Chesbrough describes open innovation as an approach in which the company markets both its own ideas and innovations generated in other organizations and seeking ways to bring these ideas to the market using channels may be outside your current business (e.g., licensing and spin-offs). With this philosophy, the boundary between an enterprise and its environment is more permeable to the flow of innovations between the two.
We can find examples of successful open innovation in many sectors:
* The networking leader Cisco incorporates most of the new technology you need through investment or partnerships with promising startups.
* The giant consumer products, Procter & Gamble R & D spread outwards under the slogan "Connect & Develop" in order to generate business outside the half of its innovations and external organizations to offer any ideas generated internally was never used.
* Qualcomm, a leader in mobile technology, stopped selling its own terminals and concentrated on marketing its intellectual property and chips for companies the likes of Nokia and Motorola to incorporate the products.
* Unlike other pharmaceutical companies, most of the drugs being developed by Pfizer have originated outside the company.
* The software produced by communities of developers and offered as open source (whose best-known example is the Linux operating system) is changing the business models of companies like IBM and Sun.
* The content generated by users of Web 2.0 has been the driving force behind concepts such as Wikipedia, Facebook or YouTube.
The principles behind open innovation contrasts with the traditional closed approach:
* Acknowledges that "not all the best professionals working in our company and the need to discover and exploit external knowledge and experience.
* Take a bearing on intellectual property (IP) system and others who use our IP, compared to strategies based solely on the protection and control of IP itself.
Gives priority to the business model as the key to capturing the value of innovation, rather than a quick entry.
Open innovation includes phenomena such as current innovations developed by users, the croudsourcing and open source software and one of its most interesting aspects is that questions some of the basic principles of competitive strategy and marketing conventional
* Items that were vitally important in previous approaches to strategy, such as ownership of resources that create value, barriers to entry and switching costs, are of secondary importance in an environment of open innovation.
* Some forces that had been neglected in previous approaches, such as community participation, construction of networks and innovation ecosystems and attracting the participation of individual volunteers, are key stages in open innovation.
Open innovation provides new ways to generate and capture value. Companies that are able to apply the ideas to drive outside their own business and project their internal ideas outside their current operations will be those who win in this new game.
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