I’m in Las Vegas and ready for the Open Innovation Conference from Marcus Evans. The conference actually featured an “open innovation strategic IP scenarios” pre-conference workshop this afternoon. Most of the conference participants will arrive on Tuesday morning for a full day of action from 9am until 7pm. We are expecting about 100 people for this particular conference. This is an impressive number and exciting news as it is a signal that more organizations are becoming interested in open innovation and dedicating time and resources to learn more about it.

“Advance innovative ideas through partner collaboration and co-development” is the theme of this conference. In chatting with Dennis, one of the conference organizers, I heard about that philosophy behind this year’s conference. Each innovation conference carries with it an overarching theme and individual workshop tracks that contribute to that theme. The workshop tracks for Tuesday are “dismantling the “not invented here” mentality and “establishing a culture that values open innovation at every level.”

In looking over the conference schedule, I am most interested in these two tracks and the 9 programs that will be presented within the tracks because open innovation represents a departure from the status quo for many organizations and individuals who share in the leadership for the future of innovation in companies. It is an appropriate start that we challenge assumptions about what innovation means and value the role organizational culture plays in making a movement towards open innovation and enabling outside partners more than in the past. I’m going to get some rest tonight and be ready with a few blog entries tomorrow!

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This last weekend, at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes talking about collaboration and crowdsourcing with the great folks at GiveMeaning. I had a similar discussion with Jaison Morgan, of the X-Prize Foundation, in Santa Monica last fall. But sadly, these sorts of meetings seem to be few and far between.

By my last count, there are a few dozen web portals dedicated to crowd-sourcing, on the spectrum from ideation, through charity and into straight-up commerce and procurement. I should know - I run one of them. And yet, in a field defined by cooperation over competition, and the wisdom of the crowd over the supremacy of the individual, there is a noticeable glaring lack of communication between these companies.

Why? Here are the reasons I see: Read the rest of this post >

A recent article in the Creativity and Innovation Management journal (March 2008) takes on internet marketplaces for technology such as yet2.com and Innocentive, and shows that there’s still a bumpy road ahead for totally open innovation. Specifically, the success rate has been far lower than expected.

In their study of 25 large Swiss and German firms (on average, 8 457 employees and 2 135 million € in revenue), Ulrich Lichtenthaler and Holger Ernst find that markets for technology have remained imperfect, resulting to high transaction costs and limited adoption by industry incumbents. Although all the firms surveyed were aware of different service providers, and several firms had invested substantial time and resources to decide on their technology offerings, the maximum number of transactions for a single company was only one out-licensing and one in-licensing agreement.

It might be no wonder, therefore, that most industry experts interviewed by Lichtenthaler and Ernst “have relatively reserved attitudes towards these marketplaces”. Only two out of 25 firms wanted to give the internet marketplaces another chance in the short to medium term, while the rest are presumably waiting for the markets to shed their imperfections. Thus, a vicious circle is set up: firms do not want to spend their resources on imperfect markets, while markets remain imperfect as long as firms do not participate more actively.

According to the authors, the most severe deficit is that the commercialization of technology through internet marketplaces constitutes a relatively unsystematic and passive approach. Specific technology needs or customers are not addressed, and problems and solutions are communicated very broadly. This makes matching technologies with buyers difficult, and numbers tell the rest of the tale: in 2004, yet2.com, with its 90 000 registered users, concluded only 10 technology transfers. Companies also tend to publish only relatively unattractive, residual technologies that have limited value, further weakening the attractiveness of using the marketplace. Read the rest of this post >