Why is everyone talking about OPEN INNOVATION?

Innovation, creation, strategy are challenging words. It is not easy to define them precisely. How do you decide whether a person, a professional or a manager, is more capable than another to exploit events in their favor? If, for example, it is able to avoid difficulties and, in any situation, find advantages. Say it for a company? Even more difficult…

Striving to notice the good things, accept the good news and find reasons for happiness is a good way to start your own personal improvement. For the business world, however, how can you grow, reach a good level of maturity and find the greatest number of strategic levers for each project?

OPEN INNOVATION, CO-INNOVATION AND CO-CREAZION

If it is open, innovation presupposes that companies can (and in some cases must!) make use of ideas outside their own organization, test unstructured internal ideas and discover new ways of gaining access to the market. Only in this way can open innovation advance, improve and strengthen itself.

TYPICAL SCENARIO OF HOLDINGS

In the research and development or product launch phase, rather than just using a team, companies can look for other opportunities. Here are the most common open innovation strategies: acquisitions of startups, partnerships, innovation competitions, purchase or licensing of patents or joint ventures. All these examples have the significant advantage of having a higher ROI, higher productivity and a high probability of going to the market faster than a more traditional innovation path.

Innovation is truly open when more people from different backgrounds are invited to operate in a single innovation process. Companies are finding that working with people organized in teams, with backgrounds and specialties different from those within their own structure, the so-called functional cross team, is the best solution. This allows you to look at problems, challenges and opportunities from different angles, different ways of thinking, to produce efficient results to concrete problems. The first step that starts any open innovation process has to do with defining diversity in teams.

OPEN INNOVATION? WHAT IS IT (REALLY)

Open innovation is a way to increase your competitiveness on the market and is put in place when an open and diverse community using appropriate collaboration tools is committed to participating in a small (or large!) direct challenge.

The tools must be “agile”, to find all the mechanisms that can help to identify ideas that resonate with the community, identify those suitable to solve challenges, test those that can become viable solutions and start an improvement process immediately from the first phase of testing.

“I suggest to consider open innovation as a philosophy or mentality that all companies can experience. WWG in the past has organized hackathon in University, crowdsourcing initiatives and in general is sensitive to everything that can help innovation processes. In this case you connect the internal resources, the external resources and you find opportunities together. It’s the classic win win Situation”

Mohamed Deramchi, CEO and founder at WWG

OPEN INNOVATION, INNOVATION MANAGER AND INNOVATIVE TEAM

Open innovation projects are implemented to provide inspiration, facilitate co-creation and feed business matching. The professional figure who usually deals with this is the Innovation Manager. The Innovation Manager is responsible for innovation and transforms ideas into value for the company. It is an emerging profession and for many reasons is not easy to introduce in all business realities.To advance technological development and innovation in general, even in the absence of this profile, you can find an external team capable of:

1. Managing projects
   The team is able to organize and implement test projects, prototypes, continuously controlling human and financial resources
2. Accept the challenges
   The team considers the challenge as a basic element of its work and must be able to support this attitude throughout the working group during all phases of the project
3. Have an overview
   The team is responsible for innovating and triggering change. To do this, you must have an overview of everything you need to achieve the goal
4. Knowing and recognising diversity
   The team loves wealth of ideas, creativity and confrontation. Innovation is best stimulated if you are able to easily exploit different points of view
5. Show dedication
   The team accepts the challenge because it firmly believes in what it does and must be able to transfer internally and externally the dedication to its group with constancy and authority
6. Expressing curiosity and creativity
   The team recognizes trends in advance, has a healthy curiosity combined with the continuous generation of ideas for this greatly helps the implementation of the innovation process
7. Be collaborative
   The team never achieves a brilliant success thanks to the work of individuals. Innovation is always a collective phenomenon and work takes place according to cycles based on this premise

OPEN INNOVATION ACCORDING TO WWG

An open innovation project is effective if the management of the environment is assured, if the appropriate “ceremonies” are put in place, people are identified (or provided) to facilitate the creation process, obstacles are avoided, motivate all the people involved and release prototypes according to the times agreed with the customer. When choosing to test an open innovation process it is essential to find enabling factors within your organization.

You have to believe it!

Here is how our software company can support these types of projects:

• WWG helps companies to find (or to create) these favourable conditions to grow innovation by transmitting an entrepreneurial spirit and an experimental approach. 

• WWG guarantees a prior knowledge of problems that may arise during the interaction between companies and the external team. 

• WWG acquires the necessary knowledge to be able to open an open innovation project in companies, establishes together with the client the main innovation activities.

• WWG deals with scouting or the selection of partners (startups, associations, research centers, universities, Italian or international companies) and supports the work of the group that is formed with lean and agile working methodologies.

• WWG keeps the intuition alive, monitors the progress of the process and, above all, makes its experience available to the company and the team.

• WWG organizes concrete occasions in which one or more teams can dedicate themselves to a project in which it is useful to generate and validate new ideas (Call4ideas, crowdsourcing initiatives, hackathon, innovation laboratories, university projects).

Thanks to Open Innovation companies will no longer go in solitude towards processes of digitalization, meeting pilot projects without a product guide, but will collaborate in a new way with the outside world. As never before, they will include customers, competitors and partners.

By choosing to work with an external team, companies support the culture oriented to innovation, the enhancement of skills, the introduction of organizational changes to support innovation or simply decide to better understand what is happening out there.

Let’s try to think together about your next open innovation project?