What can a smaller organization or entrepreneurial individual do to be a part of larger organization’s open innovation initiatives? How can they connect in and what can they connect in? Many times people ask me what they can do with their idea? During more closed innovation times it was difficult to pitch your ideas to a large organization. Standard company policies were to “not to review, accept, or fund any submitted idea from outside the company.” Times are changing a bit thanks to the need for open innovation for large organizations to not only be successful but to survive. I’m learning that the idea has to be extremely well developed, perhaps have intellectual property or a patent connected to it, and already testing or even commercialization behind it. Just an idea isn’t nearly as valuable as the intellectual property that a company can accesss, especially when it solves a problem they are current having. The companies are making their problems more widely known so individuals and other organizations can provide their solutions. The solutions just have to fit and be well developed…it can’t be just an idea. P&G asks “Do you have a game-changing product, technology, business model, method, trademark, package or design that can help deliver new products and/or services that improve the lives of the world’s consumers? Do you have commercial opportunities for existing P&G products/brands?” If you do, you can reach them through their portal at http://www.pgconnectdevelop.com. For instance you would contact them if you have a low cost ability to create foam/effervescence in solution. At the Open Innovation Conference this week we learned that this is a current challenge they have and are accepting partners for.

All of these big companies want to be the “partner of choice.” This was a buzz word at the conference. General Mills is the 6th biggest food company but they want to be the #1 partner of choice. They want to be the first company an entrepreneur comes to with a relevant solution they need. Researchers from BYU approached General Mills with a technology they created to carbonate yogurt. General Mills saw value in it and now the innovation “Fizzix” Yogurt is hitting stores. Here is an article I found from BYU about this.

It appears that large companies are still not really reaching out much, but they are now becoming more open for people to come to them. They are shifting from having formal policies “not to review, accept, or fund any submitted idea from outside the company” to creating portals where people can contact them. The P&G connect and develop portal as well as General Mills G-Win is an example of this. This BrainReactions BrainWaves e-magazine article details how entrepreneurs can partner with General Mills and other Fortune 500 companies. Maybe you can connect in the next Fizzix to your “partner of choice.”

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One theme the Open Innovation conference that stood out is that in large companies, there is often an innovation consulting team or unit that is a generalist and will help the other individual business units. They are almost like innovation consultants within the organization or “intrepreneurs” who are always looking for opportunities to develop and will then approach the specific business unit within the organization about the opportunity, or the specific business unit will seek the help of the innovation consultants within the organization. Generally this is a small team of individuals who are expert on innovation and product development. This generalist team focused on innovation within the organization is more valuable then just giving each business unit the responsibility for innovation without help. if each business unit were fully responsible for their own innovation without the help of the innovation consultants, the success wouldn’t be as great because the day to day operations of the business unit prevent the long term and exploratory focus needed. Plus, the business unit leaders are expert in their own product and market, not necessarily innovation. It is also a different mindset between operating and innovating. Innovating is more ambiguous and risky and takes a more entrepreneurial creative skill set than operations. In addition, innovation consultants possess specific knowledge about innovation processes that would take individuals in the business units a long time to learn and develop and they most prominently, they don’t have the additional time to work on it. It was found at the conference that having these generalists were critical for innovation success not only because they are expert on innovation but because they also serve as organizational connectors who can bring best practices from one business unit or product area to the next. They facilitate sharing of information and resources for innovation. The good news is that it doesn’t take a large team to pull this off. It can be done with as few as 1-2 professionals to start, but these professionals must be fully engaged in innovation. So one key finding from the Open Innovation conference is to establish an innovation position or team within the organization that can connect and facilitate innovation initiatives throughout the organizations.

This Open Innovation conference I’m currently at is attended by lots of people involved with technology innovation from large companies…think companies that would have teams of chemists and other Science and Engineering PhD researchers. I am a social scientist and qualitative researcher but I still was able to partially grasp many of the concepts. For big companies, especially those that rely on science and technology to innovate, it’s about partners and suppliers but not yet consumers and not yet general internet users. “Crowdsourcing” was rarely mentioned during these 3 days if at all. The concept was eluded to though. This means that when large companies are thinking about open innovation they are thinking about opening up beyond internal R&D to their own employees, business partners, or suppliers. The large companies are slower to change and crowdsourcing, harvesting from the open domain knowledge base on the internet, and innovation practices that smaller companies can do are not yet prominently on the center of the radar, they are just getting on the outskirts of the radar. The large companies take things one step at a time, each foot slowly place in front of the next. They have more cultural, legal, and company policy barriers that prevent them from moving quickly. So for many companies open innovation may mean gathering ideas from employees but not yet gathering ideas from their consumers or opening it up to any internet user to submit online. In essence, the companies are seeing a great need to open up…but they are not yet fully open. Some of the most fully open things I heard were from IBM who make many of their ideas generated in sessions available to anyone. That is sort of unbelievable and I’ll be searching to find the idea list soon.

Also, these companies operate at such a large and global scale that they are only interested in going big and innovating in areas where they can have large impacts. So, a single idea from a single one of their consumers isn’t as intriguing of an open innovation solution as developing a partnership to jointly offer a product to a large market that is already developed. An example of this is the collaboration between Dunkin Donuts and P&G to offer Dunkin Donuts coffee in retail stores. This is big, branded, developed, ready, and tested and the scale that large companies are interested in. If you have millions of dollars their is less interest in risking and trying to screen and develop raw ideas when you can just get the finished product.