By Michael Glessner
Considering an open innovation initiative? Don’t take it lightly. For B2B companies, who face unique additional challenges, identifying and achieving value can be especially difficult (see The Value of Open Innovation for B2B Companies for more detail). If your company sees the value and is ready to get started, here are four critical steps that will help ensure success.
Step 1 – Frame the Context of your Initiative
The open innovation journey begins as the manager contemplates the context of a solution. Let’s break the context down into three key areas of focus:
- Determine the key drivers. Are teams stuck due to technical hurdles in a specific, non-core discipline? Is vetting new products with real customers a challenge for development teams? These drivers may not require crowds to find a solution, but rather a more targeted group of collaborators.
- Identify the broader context of industry challenges and longer term vision. If regulatory compliance is a key factor in development efforts, that needs to be considered upfront in the design.
- Gauge the company’s comfort with sharing information. Will the company share important project information such as research data and potential commercialization hurdles with partners (with or without non-disclosure agreements)?
