Perspectives on Innovation

By David Ritter, Chief Technology Officer, InnoCentive

In this post, I’d like to build on my previous comments regarding the similarities between Open Innovation and Strategic Sourcing.  I think this metaphor can help executives understand the imperatives and challenges they face when considering their innovation strategy.

To compete in the global economy, companies need to establish core capabilities that enable them to take advantage of their scale.  Strategic sourcing is a classic example – manufacturing companies aggregate their demand across their factories for materials and negotiate with vendors from a position of strength and volume.  Sometime after 1960, strategic sourcing became a competitive necessity.  Companies that make stuff in any volume absolutely had to create the organization, processes, and culture that enable strategic sourcing, or they’d be driven out of business by others that had built this capability. (more…)

I am very excited to share with you this video interview between InnoCentive CTO David Ritter and Bill Laberis, Editorial Director and Social Media Manager, Custom Solutions Group, IDG.  This discussion focuses on the important role that CIOs and other IT leaders should play in the implementation of a company’s innovation strategy.

In the interview, David talks about how investing in collaboration tools, social networks and idea management platforms is usually insufficient to truly improve innovation. Disjointed efforts usually elicit no tangible results, and often create information noise – indecipherable data – making it difficult to aggregate, rationalize and analyze. Instead he argues for a Challenge-driven innovation approach that will complement existing strategies and investments in social networking and collaboration.

This program is filled with insightful learnings, experiences and best practices that you can use right away! Have a look!

By David Ritter, Chief Technology Officer, InnoCentive

To compete in today’s economy, companies must find ways to innovate faster with their current resources. Open innovation (OI) is no longer just an interesting new approach to experiment with – OI is an essential core capability for R&D intensive enterprises. If you rely on innovation to drive your business, and you’re not proficient in OI, you’re at a disadvantage – because many of your competitors are already leveraging the talent and insight available throughout the world.

To help enterprises build this critical capability, we are very excited with the launch of the third generation of our @Work enterprise platform, InnoCentive@Work 3. @Work is InnoCentive’s SaaS offering, bringing the InnoCentive.com Challenge methodology into the organization. It is a web-based suite of tools and services that helps companies utilize the diverse knowledge inside and outside of their organization by creating online communities and facilitating collaboration to solve important business challenges, regardless of where solutions are hiding. (more…)

I’ve spent the last two days at SAP’s TechEd 2008 conference in Las Vegas.  At this gathering of 6,000 enterprise software developers, business process experts, analysts and other IT stakeholders, we launched a strategic partnership aimed at changing the way companies innovate in Computer Science and IT.  I’ll be writing more extensively about this relationship over the coming days, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts right away while they’re fresh.

Participation and engagement in SAP’s online communities has exploded over the last few years.  There are now 1.3 million members in the SAP Developer Network (SDN).  Several other related communities span an additional 500,000+ members.  Taken together as the “SAP Community Network”, this ecosystem is actively helping to  shape SAP’s agenda and success.  Many members are employees at major SAP customers and partners.  The leaders in these communities have a strong voice – on SAP’s site and through their own independent blogs and networks.  It’s been great to have a chance to share our model and vision with them and listen to their input and questions.

Here are some quick takeaways from the event so far:

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In an excellent posting titled “Building a better collective memory”, Michael Nielsen makes the point that science currently lacks the ‘trust infrastructure’ and incentives necessary for free, unrestricted trading of questions and ideas. Imagine two scientists; each has information that could benefit the other more than it benefits themselves. In an ideal world, they’d exchange this information, and both would be better off. This is the concept of ‘comparative advantage’. Unfortunately, in the real world these scientists:

-Will probably never meet in the first place
-If they should happen to meet, they won’t likely talk about the relevant gaps in their work
-Even if they discuss their needs, they don’t have any basis on which to trust each other enough to engage in collaboration

Michael envisions an ideal “collaboration market” that will enable the open (or at least productive) exchange of ideas. This engendered lots of interesting debate, mostly about why none of the existing collaboration sites, publication archives, and the like are NOT fostering this type of exchange. Since we’ve been thinking about this problem for some time at InnoCentive, I thought I’d share some perspective on what characteristics we believe a collaboration platform needs to be effective.

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