How Really Big Companies Open Innovate: Insights from the Open Innovation Conference

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.

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