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More Interviews on “Open Innovation”
Open Innovation is a topic near and dear to my heart because I believe a new focus on innovation is critical to every business’s competitiveness in the formation of this new economy. Maybe it’s more than growing giant businesses for the sake of growth alone. Maybe it’s more about our way of life and how we create our world in this century from a global perspective. We will see where our priorities are as we emerge from what Richard Florida calls “the great reset.”
Just a few short years ago, if a company was going to leap forward competitively, they had a single focus of putting PCs on everyone’s desks. Not long after that, they needed to have everyone on the Internet, and eventually, of course, everyone needed broadband. These days, practically every business—small, medium or large—provides these kinds of resources to employees. In fact, now that almost everyone has in the palm of their hand what was once solely on their desktop, what are ‘we’ as a collection of societies in this world going to do with all this capability?
What will inspire new business opportunities and new, more competitive products? I think we’re just back to what counts: ’It’s all about your people’ and how management views the talents of people in their business and cultivates new ways to be creative and innovative.
I’m echoing what Richard Florida has been saying in his books The Creative Class and The Great Reset. His point being that we must put our minds to cultivating innovative skills and creativity with people both inside and outside our company—globally. There are no boundaries for innovation, and you’re not going to lasso all the talent into your own company and keep it there.
Open Innovation was the inspiration for the following podcasts (see links below) which I produced on EnterpriseLeadership.org. Sponsorship for the show has been cut so we’re not able to keep this series going. However, these interviews over the period of a year were the most exciting and most thought-provoking I’ve done, so I want to be sure everyone I come in contact with gets an opportunity to hear these people talk. I want listeners to come away as inspired and motivated as I did. These interviews were sponsored through the generosity of BMC Software.
Dr. Joel West, Academician and Author, Talks about the Open Innovation Paradigm for Technology Development In this podcast, Dr. West explores what powers the concept of open innovation and how it differs from traditional innovation efforts, such as research and development.
Tom DeGarmo, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Makes a Case for Open Innovation in Economic Downturn DeGarmo provides insight from his research experience with open innovation, gives examples of open innovation communities, and gives CIOs and CTOs several takeways for using technology to carry out open innovation initiatives.
Steve Shapiro, InnoCentive’s vice president of Strategic Consulting, Talks about Using Open Innovation to Solve Tough Problems Shapiro explains the reasons for using open innovation to solve tough problems, InnoCentive’s business model for generating revenue, some of InnoCentive’s most successful challenges, the benefits of using InnoCentive, and the challenges the company faces in this economy.
How CIOs Can Reshape Their Company’s Business Model: C.K. Prahalad, Best-selling Author and Academic Prahalad provides specific examples of how senior IT executives can address new business opportunities for their companies, how new technology initiatives can drive business opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, why companies should embrace the concept of open innovation, and what the CIO role will be like 10 years from now.
Dr. David Tennenhouse, partner at New Venture Partners, Talks about Different Approaches to Open Innovation In this podcast, Tennenhouse talks about the need for companies to turn to open innovation, the way open collaboration enhanced open innovation at Intel and other organizations, the emergence of innovation that venture capital firms are seeing, and the takeaways CIOs need to be aware of if they want to promote innovation and open innovation.
Former Air Products Research Executive Talks about Establishing Successful Corporate Innovation Programs Why are some major companies good at driving corporate innovation in technology? For some answers, Enterpriseleadership.org turned to Dr. Ron Pierantozzi, who built his entire career on driving corporate innovation in a technology-related company and doing research in this area.
Harvard Business Professor Talks about Technology Investments, Especially Enterprise 2.0 After Andrew McAfee became a proponent of Web 2.0 tools, which he calls Enterprise 2.0, he developed a technology paradigm that companies can use to buy or build digital platforms for enabling their employees and other constitutents to collaborate more freely.
Symantec CEO Talks about Building a First-Rate Security Company During John Thompson’s decade as CEO of Symantec, a $6 billion enterprise security company, he transformed the company from a consumer-based software publisher to a leader in Internet security, data protection and storage management.
Owens Corning CIO Talks about Steering a Steady Technology Strategy through Bankruptcy and Beyond “Our focus is productivity, taking cost out and enabling ease of business to our customers. We want to provide an environment for our businesses and our innovation folks to engage in open innovation. This concept will enable us not only to drive product innovation internally, but externally as well.”
Photography from www.jaipurfoot.org/07_donations_help.asp
For even more insights, consider reading Vinnie Mirchandani’s The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations. I plan to interview him in the future.
Tom
More Interviews on “Open Innovation”