On June 9th, Dwayne Spradlin will be speaking at the prestigious i2i – Incentive2Innovate conference at the United Nations in New York. The conference focuses on open innovation and incentivized competition, and Dwayne will be addressing the topic of integrating open innovation and incentives into an organization’s culture. As part of his participation in the conference, Dwayne was invited to submit a guest blog post addressing this subject. Below is the text of that post.
“A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Now is the Time to Implement an Open Innovation Culture”
Every day new proof points confirm that adopting an “open” innovation culture delivers better innovations, faster cycle times, and improved economics. Many forward-thinking organizations embraced “open” in past good economic times and have created sustainable competitive advantage for themselves. These organizations moved cultural and political mountains to make this happen and for them “open” innovation will pay enormous dividends in today’s down economy.
But what about all the other organizations that must now think differently in order to survive? They continue to cling to dated ideas that they must invent, control, and own every aspect of their existence. They have erected legal, cultural, and political roadblocks to engaging the rest of the world in their businesses and are now paying the price. They desperately need “open” innovation, but are reacting to this economic crisis by “hunkering down” and will miss the opportunity to embrace change. Therein lies the challenge: they must learn to be “open” during a time when their business has the least will to think differently. (more…)
