Great day at the Open Innovation Conference

The first full day of the conference was awesome. I’m physically tired from spending about 11 hours engaged at the conference but am inspired and motivated. I was able to have a lot of great conversations, meet some interesting innovators from a wide range of companies, and I took 17 pages of notes from the various programs. It was a great day because of the quality presentations from many innovative companies and the lunches, breaks, and reception offered good times to have good conversations with the presenters and fellow participants. Within the past year I’ve probably been to over 40 presentations on innovation from that many different speakers (mostly consultants and innovation professionals from Fortune 500 companies) and this conference is a good one to offer the opportunity to hear multiple perspectives. This week I’ll share with you some things that I think are common amongst open innovators and also some things that are new and emerging for open innovators…what is becoming innovative about open innovation if you will. My approach at the conference today was to first identify themes amongst different presenters from different industries. I’m going to approach this as a case study on what a variety of companies are doing with open innovation. Some strong themes emerged that tell us what multiple companies are thinking about in terms of innovation. In the next post I’m going to first lay out some themes I saw emerging and then in later articles explore the themes further.

There were some great learning opportunities from some of the most innovative consumer product companies in the world today. P&G, IBM, Clorox, Pepsico, Kraft, and others shared what they have learned about open innovation and how they practice it. They all share similar models that recognize innovation in a stage-gate process or a porous funnel pipeline that allows for inputs and outputs throughout the innovation pipeline. In essence, most companies share similar models for innovation and open innovation that are identified in the popular books suggested on openinnovators.net.

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