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Open Innovation and the Design of Innovation Work
I recently had the chance to review a pre-press copy of a new book, The Open Innovation Marketplace, by Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin (Free Press, 2011). The authors are Chairman and CEO, respectively, of the company Innocentive. Innocentive is a pioneer in the “open innovation marketplace” that I studied in Chapter 6 of my second
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Use Open Services Innovation to Restore US Competitiveness
As the US economy begins to recover from the devastating recession of 2008 and 2009, our trade deficit with China is again growing. The rise of China and other emerging economies is triggering reflection here in the US about
How Open Innovation Can Empower ‘Creatives’
Ms. Horn raises an important issue in her article “Here’s What’s Wrong with Open Innovation – A Case for ‘Open Protection:’” how can creative people make a living in a world of “open innovation”, where the wisdom of the crowd
Competing for Contributors in Open Innovation
In my last post, I discussed how Open Innovation frames the war for talent. The role of T-shaped managers was crucial, due to their ability to integrate the ideas and skills of people both inside and outside the organization into useful solutions. In this post, I consider another prerequisite
Pharmaceutical Innovation Hits the Wall: How Open Innovation Can Help
A recent article in the New York Times announced the frightening reality facing the pharmaceutical industry: within the next year, drugs with sales of more than $50 billion are coming off patent. Left unsaid was that the incredible profits associated with these sales are also coming to an end in
The War for Talent and Open Innovation
Much has been written about the war for talent in American business. We need to hire the best and the brightest in order to compete effectively in the global economy. This leads to impassioned arguments for raising the ceiling on H1B visas, and providing provisional green cards to foreign-born
Can’t Afford to Innovate? Open up!
Former baseball catcher Yogi Berra liked to observe that “the future isn’t what it used to be.” This has also been a commonly voiced opinion about innovation. It is not hard to see why. The great research and development laboratories of the 20th century have downsized, been broken up,
From Products to Services: How Medellín, Colombia is Overcoming the Commodity Trap
I was just reminded of the importance of thinking of a product business as a service. I am just returning from an event in Medellín, Colombia, along with Ken Morse and Carter Williams, formerly from MIT and Boeing, respectively. There, the three of us discussed innovation, with the goal of helping
Everything You Need to Know About Open Innovation
Open innovation is a concept I originated that falls directly in that gap between business and academe. Conceptually, it is a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to innovation, based on the observed fact that useful knowledge today is widely distributed, and no company,
The Future of How We Consume Things
We often look at innovation in terms of the new products and technologies that come to market. We don’t often think about how we consume these new offerings. But that’s what is far more important. Our lives are shaped by how we interact with the “things” or “stuff”