Open Innovation and strategic incentive management

By Thomas Klem Andersen, Published on April 7 2014

On March 18th the Swedish Science & Technology Park IDEON hosted a one-day seminar focusing on practical experience in the area of Open Innovation. 

Here’s a few statements from the event to chant as morning prayer if you want to build a motivation for opening up your innovation activities:

-          An insignificant number of the world’s talents work within your company

-          Change will happen

-          Commodification creeps up on you and reduces margins

-          Customers expect you to improve

-          Competitors work hard to improve faster than you

-          Your product or service will eventually decline

Accordingly in Roy Sandbach’s words: Innovation is the key to growth and indeed even survival. As the world looks today you better not lock your innovation initiatives away in your R&D department behind blinded windows for the sake of secrecy. The same goes for new ventures not opening up for partners and partnerships fearing for the safety of their supposed original ideas. Chances are that competition and technology will be far ahead of you and opportunity windows long gone before you pick up momentum on your own.

Lessons learned:

-          Don’t think of your venture or established company as an independent entity capable of reaching commercial succes in and of itself.

-          Build strategic relationships and partnerships to enhance your innovation capability.

-          Design for complementarity in your partnerships to remove trust barriers and align incentives.

-          Focusing on complementarity enables you to further strengthen your core competencies and core IP letting you maintain your competetive edge.

-          Hence ’opening up’ is all about strategic incentive management and win win scenarios.