Flashpoint

By MaryAnne M. Gobble, Managing Editor, Research-Technology Management (RTM)

In the last installment of this column, I initiated a new series of topics aimed at defining the vocabulary of innovation management. The object is to look critically at the profession’s terms of art, exploring their origins and mapping their limitations, to provide new clarity, and in the process restore some of their power. By looking at the terminology at the heart of innovation management and exploring how it has emerged and evolved, perhaps we can also get a glimpse of where innovation is heading.

In the first entry in the series, we looked at the concept of disruptive innovation. This time, we’re examining another concept whose usage has become confused and, at times, diluted: open innovation (Read this column at RTM; follow RTM on Twitter @RTMJournal).

Henry Chesbrough introduced the concept of open innovation in his 2003 book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Despite popular conceptions, Chesbrough didn’t actually invent open innovation—his book is rich with examples of companies already doing it. Rather, he gave a name to the pattern and defined the paradigm:

He refined that definition in a 2006 book he co-edited, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm: “Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.” The key in both definitions is the focus on an approach driven by the business model. As Gene Slowinski and Matt Sagal point out, in their 2003 book and in a 2010 RTM article, that approach must be supported by a set of tools and processes designed to facilitate the relationships—with universities, with researchers, with individual inventors, even with competitors—that are at the core of open innovation. Slowinski and Sagal’s Want-Find-Get-Manage model, described in detail by Slowinski in Reinventing Corporate Growth, offers one framework for sustaining collaborative innovation.

Chesbrough’s assertion—in the books and in a series of journal articles between the two books (including two in the pages of this journal)—that open innovation would become absolutely essential was not wildly speculative; the precursors were clearly in place in the early 2000s. But he could not have predicted the changes to come in the few years after that first work, or the ways in which they would make openness both easier and more vital.

Indeed, Open Innovation arrived on the cusp of revolutionary change. As markets became ever more dynamic and unpredictable, new technology platforms allowed knowledge to circulate ever more freely and far more widely. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Kickstarter all were born after open innovation. Wikipedia, Linux, Google’s Raspberry Pi, and other open-source projects revealed the power of mass collaboration to create knowledge through unfettered sharing. And Red Hat and others showed that there was money to be made from open-source platforms.

The crowd and the cloud became viable, even essential, tools. Wired magazine introduced the term crowdsourcing to the world in a 2006 article by Jeff Howe, and suddenly innovation had an entire new toolset. All companies had to do was figure out what to do with it. As Kevin Boudreaux and Karim Lakhani warned in a 2013 HBR article on the subject, “Crowds are moving into the mainstream; even if you don’t take advantage of them, your competitors surely will.” All of these developments offered new tools for pursuing open innovation.

But what many practitioners and researchers alike have done is conflate these new tools with open innovation itself, either treating crowdsourcing and open innovation as synonyms or suggesting some other kind of equivalence between the two concepts. On the other end of the spectrum are those who suggest that crowdsourcing and open innovation are not related at all, or are only peripherally linked. Michel Neumann in a 2014 blog post defines open innovation as “creating and innovating with external stakeholders: customers, suppliers, partners and your wider community” and dismisses crowdsourcing as simply another form of outsourcing—in this case, outsourcing to the public at large: “Crowdsourcing requires a lower level of engagement and involvement than open innovation … the organisation solicits solutions from the crowd—not genuine contribution and collaboration.” Open innovation “suggests active collaboration between different organisations and the sharing of intellectual property,” as opposed to individual engagement.

There are variations along this continuum, as different authors construct more complex taxonomies and frameworks. Enrique Estellés maps the different kinds of relationships authors propose between crowdsourcing and open innovation, and gives some good references in the process. (The entry is somewhat awkwardly translated, but the discussion is useful nonetheless.) Ultimately, Estellés argues, “both Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing are based on the same paradigm: knowledge is distributed and its use … can be a competitive advantage.”

That comparison is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do much to illuminate the functional relationship between the two concepts. Carl Lens, founder of CreativeCrowds, provides a better illustration in a simple infographic he offered in response to a 2014 question on Quora, a Venn diagram captioned with a simple explanation: “Crowdsourcing can be a means of open innovation. Open Innovation can be a reason for crowdsourcing.” In other words, crowdsourcing is not open innovation, but rather one tool that can be used in the context of an open innovation approach—and that also has other applications that have nothing to do with innovation. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or outlets like Mechanical Turk that aim to farm out tedious work, for example, may have applications that are related to innovation, but their primary goal is not innovation.

Indeed, researchers, commentators, and practitioners also conflate open innovation with other tools. NASA, for instance, refers frequently to its system of innovation challenges as its “open innovation program.” Topcoder and Innocentive, both platforms for crowdsourcing solutions (and so tools for open innovation), both refer to themselves as “open innovation platforms.” The result has been, as Eric von Hippel acknowledged in a 2009 interview, confusion:

Chesbrough’s conception of open innovation, which he clarified in a 2011 post for Forbes, is both more inclusive and more closely defined than any of these variations:

The key point in this discussion is not whether sharing is between firms or with individuals or universities or whether information moves freely or via channels designed to protect intellectual property.

Rather, the defining principle of open innovation is the business model. The “purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge” in open innovation must be driven by the business model. Decisions about which internally developed ideas to keep and which ones to let go, about whether to bring in a partner to support development of an idea, about whether to buy in a promising concept are all rooted in the company’s overarching business model. Indeed, Chesbrough felt so strongly about the link between open innovation and business models that his second book—Open Business Models—focuses on it.

In other words, open innovation is not a tool to be deployed. It’s not a belief about the relative merits of information freedom. It is an attitude, a mindset, an approach, deeply embedded in the very foundation of the organization. An open-source project may be part of an open innovation approach, if it is supported by the business model—that is, if it supports the kinds of knowledge flows the business needs to maximize the value of its innovation pipeline. Crowdsourcing may also be a part of that approach, again as long as it is an integrated part of a wider set of knowledge flows that deliver value to the company and its stakeholders. But none of these are themselves open innovation.

In other words, open innovation is not something a company does; rather, it’s something a company is.

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MaryAnne M. Gobble is the Managing Editor of Research-Technology Management (RTM), @RTMJournal.

For an inside look at the latest issue of RTM, visit www.iriweb.org/rtm.

In the current issue (Sept-Oct, 2016):

• The Hollywood  Model: Leveraging the Capabilities of Freelance Talent to Advance Innovation and Reduce Risk. Authors: Alan Ayers, Kimberly Miller, Jongwon Park, Lawrence Schwartz, and Rich Antcliff
• Identifying Tensions in the Servitized Value Chain. Authors: Jamie Burton, Vicky Story, Judy Zolkiewski, Chris Raddats, Tim S. Baines, and Dominic Medway
• The Innovation Pivot Framework: Fostering Business Model Innovation in Startups. Authors: Isabel Garcia-Gutierrez and F. Javier Martinez-Borreguero
• Innovating with Crowds. An Interview with Karim Lakhani
• Inclusive Innovation: A Source of New Ideas to Deliver Business Growth. By Jamie N. Jones
• Big Data and R&D Management. By Greg R. Holden
• Bringing Together the Physical and Digital Worlds. By Siegfried Russwurm