How Open is Open Innovation?
On Monday I had the opportunity to participate in a Sophomore Design Management class at The New School in New York. My talk gave a brief synopsis of how we see a changing product development landscape, and the increasing merger between communication and products, with some fun Japanese anecdotes (content from the future).
The diagram above shows Open Innovation from the perspective of ownership and participation models. On the left, lead drivers behind open innovation platforms like Proctor & Gamble’s Connect + Develop and Innocentive employ very stringent access control to what I like to refer to as their porous filters. You either give away your ideas or have them patented before you can play.
This ownership model lives in the past and seems misaligned and counter intuitive to encouraging participation. Think about how the music industry has struggled to find a balance between what is legally right but socially accepted as “fair”.
On the right you have very successful software/online companies where collaboration is encouraged, celebrated and successfully monetized without making the participant feel like they lost something. They want to participate. WordPress, Craigslist, Linux and Mozilla are all good examples.
In the middle we see successful bridging between old and new models of ownership through the use of communication scaffolding, API’s, supplied content and tools. Products like Apple iTunes, Google Maps API, and NikeiD have successfully mediated the schism.
Referring to Shaun’s earlier post on Social product development, I extended the discussion around the mitigation of risk through customer participation from concept through to launch. This has the added benefit of established mind share and existing conversation at the time of launch, reducing the need for traditional ad spending. In fact, all you have to do is keep the conversation going. This is in line with the thoughts from Baked In. This quick word cloud of their blog shows the three most important parts, product, products and customers. Less importantly it also says “think like big hairy monster“. I guess everyone needs a muse. See @bakedin for more on this.
This video from Sour shows successful Mass Collaboration on a budget, here with our commentary. We also like this video of “the helicopter boys from Yomiuri land” (thanks @faris for post) Â showing how you can start conversation around a project by doing fun cool stuff. Nikon sponsored this, and sparked sharing and conversation around their new camera.
Thanks again to The New School. We love sharing. Here is the presentation on SCRIBD in PDF
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