Thursday 22 December 2011

None of us are as smart as all of us. The application of Open Innovation

Most of the Monopolies in the US Are Created by Government, Isn't That Ironic? During the course of an internal and collaborative programme of research to combine the principles of Open Innovation with a range of other inventive problem solving strategies, the main problems encountered during open innovation initiatives have been identified as follows: 1) The initial problem posed to the open innovation community is the ‘wrong problem'. 2) Lack of objective means to determine whether a ‘new' solution is better than existing solutions. 4) Failure to adequately transfer the surrounding tacit knowledge from domain to domain. Having discussed the main Open Innovation problems, we go on to outline a number of solutions. The Wrong Problem Based on our research, the first of the four problems – companies defining the wrong problem – is both prevalent, and the problem most likely to damage the reputation of the OI cause. From anopen innovation perspective, knowing they are unable to make the transition, incumbents thus tend to pose open innovation questions that are about improving matters in the current business model. Here are a few exemplar case studies of the problem: * A company asking for solutions to improve temperature retention in soda cans by incorporating an internal insulating layer. Except that the problem owners have decided that they want to solve the problem at a level they understand. If the problem owner, however, has no authority to solve the problem at a different level, or – worse – has no domain knowledge to be able to judge whether a proposed solution at one of those levels is better, then the opportunity is lost. open innovation figure 1

The figure includes a description of the bread problem as an exemplar. The posed open innovation problem of bread with a crusty-crust and a soft middle is very much about trying to solve tangible level problems associated with the purchase and consumption of the bread. Figure 2: ;Outcome Mapping Template And Bread
As soon as an open innovation problem owner goes to the world with a problem like ‘find better ways to join component A and B together' it is theoretically possible to very quickly identify other ways of delivering the required function (Reference 2).

Figure 3.

Figure 3: Looking For Solutions In Domains That Are Known

Although unable to solve this out-of-domain-knowledge psychological inertia problem, one thing that can be done to help ease the transfer of solutions from one domain to another is not just arrange knowledge in functional terms, but also then to map solutions within each function in terms of how well a given solution performs certain key attributes. Figure 4: Attribute Mapping Of Different Join Methods

Even if incumbent designers and engineers can be convinced of the potential merits of a solution from another domain, the almost inevitable next problem is that the specific context of the originating domain is inherently different from the context of the domain looking for a new solution.

The coriander industry has traditionally solved the problem by using a rotating drum to mechanically fragment the shells. The coriander process engineers, however, understood rotating drums and were basically looking for a better mechanical system. Getting pistachios out of pistachio shells frequently uses the rapidly changing pressure solution to achieve its desired outcome. Given the importance of speed in any production process, this was obviously a problem for the coriander process engineers. According to TRIZ, someone somewhere will already have solved such problems (Reference 3). Figure 5: Mapping The Coriander Problem Onto The Contradiction Matrix
It is beyond the purpose and intention of this paper to discuss how those generic solutions were translated into actual solutions to the coriander problem (needless to say; they were).

Tacit Knowledge

To an extent, nearly all open innovation projects seek to resolve tacit knowledge problems by introducing a development and/or validation programme into the contractual relationship they form with a solution provider. Such validation programmes are designed to transfer the knowledge from technology owner to problem owner. The fourth reason that open innovation initiatives go wrong is that, by definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that the domain experts are unable to formally communicate to third parties.

Open Innovation as a concept makes considerable sense.

Figure 6: (Systematic) Open Innovation Protocol

Open Innovation needs to open itself to the idea that someone, somewhere already solved the problems it currently faces.

Contradiction Matrix‘, Creax Press, 2003.

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