A few weeks now into my new job I've been asking myself and many others what they think Open Innovation is, especially in regards to SAP and our technology.
Wikipedia has the following to say on the topic, first of course from where it comes:
Then what it stands for:
“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”. The boundaries between a firm and its environment have become more permeable; innovations can easily transfer inward and outward. The central idea behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (e.g. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm's business should be taken outside the company (e.g., through licensing, joint ventures, spin-offs)
It's a very interesting concept and to be honest a rather confusing concept to many, the idea that you create something and then license it to others to actually use or that you buy the use of someone else's idea since they are not using?
For the past several weeks as I've been finding my ground in my new role I've had many a conversation with various groups about new ideas inside of SAP that are being worked on and helping to find not only uses cases but business value with them but also looking at things we've seen in the past from SAP Demo Jam events and Hacker Nights and giving a lot of thought to what parts of these ideas could be interesting when applied in different ways.
It's been an exciting time and very interesting but it's also only part of the picture I think. I also deal with the Open Source topic as well which is address in part by the same Wikipedia entry.
While open source and open innovation might conflict on patent issues, they are not mutually exclusive, as participating companies can donate their patents to an independent organization, put them in a common pool or grant unlimited license use to anybody. Hence some open source initiatives can merge the two concepts, this is the case for instance for IBM with its Eclipse platform which IBM is advocating as a case of open innovation, where competing companies are invited to co-operate inside an open innovation network.
Therefore as you can see the last few weeks have been a mix of very interesting conversations in many overlapping areas with a multitude of thoughts and opinions on the matter and thus I decided before I "decide" what my own opinion is I'd like to ask all of you in the community - what is "Open Innovation" to you? Do you have examples of it? Can you measure it? Are you doing it?
