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Our projects have moved along nicely this week, as have our new biz meetings, writings and calls, but in general this week has been a week of research.

Kim, Martin and myself have been working on “the Book” project. Doing interviews, desktop research and hosting a very interesting insight workshop with our esteemed client’s management and chairman. It was our first workshop in the office and it worked out fine, although I believe we need to look more into a new printer so that all our flows, sketches, diagrams and analysis get an enhanced (and at least larger) presentation.

We have held some great conversations around the different perspectives on open innovation both internally and with clever people around us during the last couple of days. We have been invited to speak on the subject during the next couple of months both in Denmark and internationally so you will be able to read more about it in future blogposts, but here is a short version of our thoughts and experiences so far.

Open innovation initiatives in organizations can be seen as either “structured” or “emergent”. If they are “structured” the are based on the idea of “push” where participants are invited to help a given organization with input or ideas because they want to improve their own situation as customer or citizen, because they want recognition or because they can win a price. We have been part of branded innovation projects like these since 2006 and build numerous of them. We know how to make them work, both from a people, a process and a platform perspective – but we also know when this approach are less likely to give relevant new input and knowledge to the organization.
If the initiatives are more “emergent” the conversation are more based on the idea of “pull”, does not typically take place at on a company website branded for the purpose and peoples motivation to join in are more based on creating something new or relevant for themselves. It’s more a collective action than an collaboration and in this “emergent”, non-linear or process-driven conversation the participants are peers and contributors with all (or non) of them owning the ideas they share and develop together. This is a completely different approach to innovation which have greater potential and greater risk. It might be more rewarding in the end but is typically challenging the way business is done today.
We believe that both approaches are useful and valuable in their own, different way but as they demand very different organizational set-ups, competencies, tools and KPI’s they need to be handled in different ways.

We will continue to explore open innovation, how organizations of today can use these to develop new products, services and business models and what it takes from an organizational point of view in the coming months. Your ideas and comments on the subject is most welcome so pitch in here or send a mail if you share our interest.

On a completly different note: If you, like us, are interested in the lean start-up movement you should check out the Stanford course, the launchpad class

That’s that. Have a nice weekend.