Crowdsourcing: a video that summarizes it all

Recently, one of our students made a short video about Crowdsourcing and Co-creation. The video gives insight in most issues that are important in the operationalisation of co-creation:

Shell wants to invest in Open Innovation

Shell indicates to be willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in technology-oriented companies for the next 6 to 8 years. according to belegger.nl. The website has published to following text (translated):

This step helps Shell to enable the use of innovations on new projects, according to the company.

Shell refers (amongst others) to the technology that enables the company to apply their resources more thoughtfully and smarter in their quest for oil and gas and in the improvement of the process of obtaining gas and oil.The investments are categorized under Shell Technology Ventures. ,,Ideas from outside our organisation are of great importance in the exploitation of R&D.. We want to be enable the brightest to develop plans and let them take advantage of our expertise and global impact of our company in order to use these technologies as quickly as possible on our projects”, according to the chief technology officer Gerald Schotman.

Besides investing in promising technological companies, Shell wants to focus on so-called spin-outs, organisational assets that become independent and on funds of venture capitalists.

As such a great example of Open Innovation in practise.

Serious games effective in teaching (open) innovation & management

Recently, an article about the effect of serious games on teaching and learning the essentials of (open) innovation and innovation management has been published on the ssrn. The authors have researched a group of students from different nationalities playing a game in the context of an education course. By playing the game, they had the following goals:

  • Creating a shared experience of social dynamics and the paradox of co-opetition for the students;
  • Enable critical reflection on social dynamics of co-opetition based on this experience;
  • Experience-based learning — enable the students to apply what they learned from their reflection and experience through iteration;
  • Create deeper understanding of open innovation;
The study uses a series of plays and discussions and compares the results of these sessions with game theory. They round up with several interesting conclusions:
  • We argued that play can be a source of creativity, imagination and fun in a teaching setting (cf. Kolb & Kolb, 2010).
  • We found evidence that playful games can help to create such an experience through interactive experience and simple simulation — thereby helping the students to better understand the theory behind open collaborative innovation (Bogers, 2012; Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough et al., 2006; Dahlander & Gann, 2010; Nalebuff & Brandenburger, 1997).
  • Moreover, playful games allow understanding open innovation as interplay of complex processes of relating, social capital, and institutions (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Rolfstam, 2009; Searle, 2005; Stacey & Griffin, 2005).
  • They thus allow us to get a more holistic understanding of the complex social dynamics that emerge when people have to deal with novelty. (Bogers & Sproedt, 2012).
Two of the most used innovation games in teaching (professionals) and higher education are:

 

Creativity as a Life Skill for Innovation

One of my favorite reads of the last couple of years is the work “Creative Leadership: Skills that drive innovation”, written by Puccio, Mance and Murdock. They argue that by making use of the right thinking skills an individual should be able to think outside their ‘area of familiarity’. The origin of radical innovation begins outside this so-called zone of comfort. By making use of the right converging techniques the individual should be able to make deliberate decisions between alternatives. See figure 1.

Puccio et al. mention the following essential thinking skills necessesary for diverging and converging:

Affective Skills (Puccio, Mance, Murdock)


Cognitive Skills (Puccio, Mance, Murdock)

Recently, Puccio gave a wonderful Ted-presentation about creativity:

Innovation Management at Avans University

A couple of weeks ago, I had to give a presentation about innovation management at the Frismakers Festival in the Netherlands. The presentation was about innovation management at Avans University, where I’m employed as a lecturer on this topic.

The presentation follows a structured number of steps:

firstly, I had to jump into the subject: the innovation management game, a game about innovation management, a company that is now commercially developed but started as a spinn-off from Avans University.

In the next step, a short summary of the need for innovation in the educational sector followed: it all comes down to our business model. Why are students going to Universities? Right, because they’ll receive graduate certificates. Why do they need them? Right, because companies ask for these credentials. But what if companies are not asking for credentials from a single University anymore, more rather like their new employees to have different certificates from high-end institutes like MIT or Harvard, received by following online courses (which is already possible), why would students go to a smaller institute like ours? The current business model is on the edge of a huge change and educational facilities need to think about their innovative capacity quickly.
In the next phase, I explained what we did: the process of innovation. The direction of innovation is mainly top-down. But most of the (fuzzy front end of) innovation starts bottom-up, like in many professional organizations. Therefore, many great ideas will never make it to a good business case, let alone a true a commercial product or service.

So what did we learn? Innovation has to be facilited both top-down (for the larger projects, oftenly incremental) as bottom-up (for radical ideas). We also learned that innovation (therefore) mostly happens incidently. However, the whole idea behind innovation management is to not let is happen incidently. And thirdly, there is never enough time. Innovation is something we usually do in the weekends.

Bottom line: we acted on it by creating a new rol: the innovation director (1 fte) in the lowest level of hierarchy in the organisation: the team of lecturers. All the lecturers got 5% of their time to spend on innovation, which is managed by this director. Ideation and Concepting are seperated; some people are better at the first, some people do better at concepting. The director talks to the educational board and makes sure that project fall within strategic plans or – when not – are supported by external or internal financial resources. And it’s starting to pay off.

The video:
Enable subtitles and translate if you want to follow part of it.The presentation:

European Commission opts for Industrial Revolution 2.0

Recent decades have been the years of outsourcing. Not only did companies outsource traditional cheap production towards more interesting markets, companies also outsourced most of their ICT and knowledge-based services towards cheaper countries. During recent years, many organisation have also outsourced their innovation departments and knowledge-intensive research and development branches towards countries in the Far East and Brazil. No longer does the Europe have the competitive advantage of being an innovative leader.

The Lisboa targets have been losing importance because of these trends; seemingly enough reason for the European Commission to launch a new goal: Industrial Revolotion has to be re-enforced.

Will this “Industrial Revolution 2.0” become a realistic scenario?

More information: Europese Unie

Open Innovation 2.0: evolution or revolution?

In the latest issue of IPSIM, an interesting article article about Open Innovation 2.0 has been published. What is Open Innovation 2.0, according to the author?

“A key distinguishing attribute of Open Innovation 2.0 is focus on adoption. Michael Schrage of MIT has written “Innovation is not innovators innovating, it is customers adopting”. While much of the focus of past innovation studies and research is on innovation creation, very often the hardest part is the adoption of innovations. While there are many accepted definitions of innovation I use the following definition to provide a common reference point:

Innovation is the creation and adoption of something new which creates value for the organization that adopts it.”

More information:
IPSIM

Global Innovation Barometer: Innovation has Strategic Priority

Last week the Global Innovation Barometer (GE) has been launched. The barometer provides results from (the most important) economies around the world . For instance, in the Dutch Report they conclude: “Innovation is a strategic priority for Dutch Businesses”, with almost 91% of the respondents mentioning it.  Moreover, the report mentions the following indicators as most important for innovation:

  • the improvement of existing products or services (mentioned by 80%)
  • the development of entirely new products (mentioned in second position by 70% of Netherland respondents)
  • the development of new business processes to improve profitability (mentioned in third position by 61% of respondents).

Visit their website for the full reports.

Open Innovation: Comparing Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Idea Sharing in SMEs

Open Innovation has been hyped for over a decade now. Despite of the fact that many researchers have been researching core aspects of the Open Innovation definition – as Henry Chesbrough has put it in 2003 and redefined it in 2010 – the concept has somewhat ‘blurred’, meaning that Open Innovation oftenly is mistaken for related terminology, such as (plain and easy) collaboration, co-creation or corporate transparancy. So it’s time to make choices…what is Open Innovation and what is not Open Innovation?

Ed Cottam, a researcher currently undertaking a PhD on Open Innovation at the Newcastle Business School, recently started an extended research study to break down the topic of open innovation into its bare essentials. This way he aims to be able to identify the key concepts that really matter and removing the superfluous.

He is asking your help, as part of the Open Innovation expert community, to gather as much qualitative information as possible. If you have experience in the field of (open) innovation or innovation management, he (and the whole community) is desparately waiting for your input.

Please answer the following questions (preferably in a comment, but an email will also do fine); leave your email address and we’ll share the final results with you personally. Thanks in advance on behalf of Ed Cottam!

  1. Please specify your current position/organisation and your experience with Open Innovation. Please specify an URL to your Linkedin-account so that Ed Cottam is able the check your credentials (for research purposes).
  2. Currently, what are the key on-going debates within open innovation?
  3. What are the key perspectives in open innovation?
  4. What resource(s) would you recommend a PhD student study, providing an excellent account of the chronological development, perspectives and debates in open innovation? This could be a thesis, article(s) or book(s).
  5. If you were to train a student for 8 weeks so they could produce an excellent, PhD standard literature review on open innovation and you had a million dollars on the line, what would you have them focus on? What would that programme look like?
  6. Do you know any researchers who’ve tackled this corpus very effectively and efficiently? Who are they? What did they do that was different?
  7. What are your favourite open innovation instructional books and resources? If a PhD student had to teach themselves, what would you suggest they use?

Who’s kicking off?