Everything You Need to Know About Open Innovation
Open innovation is a concept I originated that falls directly in that gap between business and academe. Conceptually, it is a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to innovation, based on the observed fact that useful knowledge today is widely distributed, and no company, no matter how capable or how big, could innovate effectively on its own. Yet at the same time there is a critical role for an overarching architecture that connects these seemingly disparate activities together. And the business model (which itself can be innovated) determines what companies look to bring inside the firm and allow to go outside the firm. So open innovation supplies a lot for academics to study, and there have been literally hundreds of academic papers written now on this topic in the past 8 years. For business, open innovation is a more profitable way to innovate, because it can reduce costs, accelerate time to market, increase differentiation in the market, and create new revenue streams for the company. So there’s a lot of opportunity for business to profit from open innovation.
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