What is an Open Innovation?

The idea of an Open Innovation can be understood as the cooperation between the enterprises and other items that means the exchange of knowledge and solutions that can help develop its growth. The term itself has been introduced by Henry Chesbrough, an American economist.

He has described the term and how companies have moved from so-called closed innovation to open way of introducing innovations in his book: “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”.

In the past the process of developing and marketing products has took place within the company. Over the years, however there appeared a few factors that has changed :

• Educated people number rose in amount and their mobility has increased
• With the mobility the exchange of knowledge between companies has also increased
• The possibility of developing ideas outside the company through licensing agreements appeared
• Companies have started to think about the new ways of how to design their innovation process like reaching out outside of their own company and with the cooperation with suppliers and competitors
• Companies realised that the good innovations can also be developed outside of their company and they involved other parties

Source: Open Innovation » Bock Project Management (bock-pm.com)

The example of  accompany that has introduced the idea of open innovation is Coca-Cola. Their Freestyle dispenser machine is an open innovation model. It is connected with mobile app so the consumers can save their flavour mix. Coca Cola can then use the data obtained from the consumers and develop their product according to their tastes demands.

Resources:

https://bock-pm.com/service/open-innovation/

https://openinnovation.eu/open-innovation/

https://www.designorate.com/co-creation-open-innovation-process/

https://www.designorate.com/successful-open-innovation-examples/