3 Keys to Maximize the Benefits of Open Innovation

The business value of open innovation lies in its ability to drive creativity, flexibility, and efficiency by leveraging external resources and perspectives. Through open innovation challenges for its customers, MindSumo provides benefits that include:

• Accelerated innovation cycles. Instead of relying only on internal R&D, enterprises can leverage external ideas to bring new products and services to market more quickly
• Access to diverse expertise. Companies can tap into a broad pool of perspectives, knowledge, and expertise, which in turn can lead to the development of more innovative and effective solutions
• Market expansion. Open innovation can help organizations successfully gain access to new market and customer segments
• Enhanced flexibility. Leaders can gain insights into emerging trends and potential disruptions, enabling them to respond quickly to changing market conditions and technological advancements.
• Increased competitiveness. A natural extension of the previous benefits, companies that effectively use open innovation are better positioned to stay competitive in rapidly evolving industries

3 Ways to Maximize Benefits

Benefits like these are not automatic. Open innovation activity needs to be part of a larger strategic vision. Here are three ways to get the most value from open innovation initiatives.

Understand Where Open Innovation Sits in the Innovation Funnel

An open innovation challenge aims to give you many ideas, suggestions, or solutions. As such, it sits at the top of the innovation funnel. You will progressively cull the responses as they are assessed, to the point where you typically have anywhere from two to ten solutions that merit strategic consideration. Designing your challenges with this in mind will help produce a high number of appropriately targeted responses.  

Define Your Expectations

It’s a paradox: To make the most of the openness of an open innovation challenge, you need to have well-defined expectations. Clarify these expectations before you begin to design your challenge. What questions do you want to answer? Do you want a deep dive that gives you useful insights as well as solutions? Are you looking for a large volume of responses in a short timeframe? What specific information do you want? 

Have a Plan

Successful implementation of an open innovation challenge requires a strategic approach to integrating external ideas seamlessly into the organization’s innovation processes. A challenge will produce a range of ideas, suggestions, or solutions depending on how you and your MindSumo innovation project manager construct it. Once those are in hand, what then? How will you work with those results? What criteria will you apply to decide which responses will be moved forward? Know how you will proceed before you launch a challenge. This can be the biggest pitfall of companies that try open innovation. They source a whole bunch of great ideas, but because the infrastructure isn’t in place to make the most of those ideas, they die on the vine. Not only are potentially valuable innovation opportunities lost, but so are future budgets for open innovation. Putting the time in on the front end to plan how you will implement the best ideas on the back end will be time well spent and ensure you’re successful in your open innovation activities.