Open Innovation Excellence

While sitting in the warm afternoon sun on one of these amazing lakes near Berlin, I was discussing with my old friend Angelo D´Angelico about actual tendencies in innovation. Angelo is one of these genius technical nerds – his company acoustic-consult is developing and engineering sounds for product packaging. If your beer opens with a nice blopp or your chips packaging sounds fresh and crispy, Angelo has his fingers in it. Experiences are not positive at all.

People like Angelo are mostly not the nice guys. They tend to tell you what they think directly and fearless. When our little discussion came to open innovation, Angelo seemed to get exited. He claimed that he is now following this trend for more than three years. Most of his experiances are not positive at all. His critics was aiming at three issues:

Angelo explained me that open innovation from the persepctive of a small engieering company makes him feel powerless. Power is shifting to the big players, they ar in the driver seat and rule the game. Supplies become part of a selection process that they dont understand well. This makes him feel small and
replacable. For Angelo, this is poison to innovation.

Powerful innovations are growing in a dialogue and the dynamics of dense communication. It is naïve to assume that one initiator has a request and there is the ready to apply innovation out there to find easily.
This will in the best case lead to incremental and inferior solutions. With open innovation, realtionships
become obviously weaker and the importance of the communication process is more and more neglected.

The most important claim from Angelos side is the lack of trust. He would never ever give his ideas in a generic OI platform any more. There is literally no reason to trust that his ideas will be protacted as they should. Some companies may have the right values but they don´t enforce them. One bad experience and the faith is gone.

All this is though. Are we on the wrong track with the more and more emerging concept of Open Innovation? To make it very clear: If people like Angelo will not play this game and paticipate, the concept of open innovation will fail.Let´s start to think how we can deal with these three critrical aspects.

Can we build in more trust, better relationships and more balances power in open innovation processes? What are the smart solutions to involve Angelo in the game and to get the best from him?

It was becoming late this Sunday, the second bottle of red wine was done and the mosquitos were biting us so that we had to leave. It was one of these great learning days.