Structured Approach to Open Innovation

Are you looking for ways to preserve and develop your company, organization or new business ideas?

I wrote these thoughts 7.9.2009 and published somewhere. Decided to upload it to Digital Villages today.

The picture is very old: I guess, it was made 1987  or 1989.

It might be a god idea to take a sneak peak into social media environments. 

Sounds strange that something called "open" promises to deliver "innovations" to maximize future profits and helps to build a healthier and more sustainable society.

Working with a structured approach to open innovation, co-creation, and global collaboration.

• Open (accepting new, different, weird, and outsider participation)

• Positive (we are attracted to positive working conditions; relaxed atmosphere & learning environment)

• Environment (open, positive, relaxed, humor, emphatic, supporting sustainable)
  
• Natural (organic evolution of collaboration; command and control doesn't work anymore)
  
• Innovation (new elements or aspects are needed to motivate collaborators like social attraction)
  
• Nomadic (social, technical, cultural mobility; open innovation brothers and sisters)
  
• Global (open culture to reach global markets through co-creation and collaboration)

Crazy Creative Finns are accepting and adapting new working cultures to enhance Open Innovation. Social media, microblogs, wikis, basecamps, nings, photo, video & podcast galleries, and blogs are used to replace traditional meeting rooms and seminars.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are networking and collaborating to improve the profitability of product development and service design.

1. Industrial products, innovations, and services are always invented and created in narrow subcultures (laboratory, R&D department, research institute, corporation). "Market Penetration" is followed by "Dedication" and finally we move towards "Saturation" if we are able to break out from the subculture and get a broader acceptance for our invention(s).
   
2. Social media can be used to "socialize" or adapt a new invention, product + service to a new culture, national market or subculture.
   
3. Social engineering can be used to understand the differences of a product development subculture and the new environment where we want to adapt it.
   
4. NIH is a valid reaction. If we don't socialize and adapt our product or service to the new market, culture or environment, the "not invented here" (NIH) is a predictable, valid, and understandable reaction.
   
5. Service design is a practical tool for personalization of a product + the service promise to a new culture, country, user / market segment.
   
6. Open Innovation is a cost effective way of producer - consumer - client service improvements. If we don't do the "prosumer adaption" we should expect product rejection comparable to hearth transplant rejection.
   
7. Open source software development takes us to a new product adaption layer. Programming is very complex in a closed environment and "open development" leads to even bigger challenges.
   
8. Personalization is needed for industrial processes and consumer gadgets. It's the core of customer orientation, but we tend to think that customers should adapt to our [the producers] needs.
   
9. Many to many networking is effective and productive only if we have a clear and structured strategy for our participation. If not, Social Media leads us to an endless loop of discussions that won't take us anywhere. Worst case of social media is talking, talking, talking into eternity - but no tangible results.
   
10. Ethernet is a starting point for data collection in a "thing links" environment where we need clear goals or are alternatively drowned into a stormy sea of data that can't be interpreted.
    
11. Values and goals are important tools in information society solution developments. We need them to control where we are, and where we are heading.
    
12. Don't accept social media as an endless talking mechanism. It can be transformed into a structured productivity tool for all kinds of organizations.

Open Innovation and Co-creation isn't limited to face to face activities within the traditional organization. Digital technology empowers us to do things with collaborators living in other countries and cultures.

Are we slowly moving towards a global networking business development?

• No physical seminars (they key is participation and sharing)
• No physical meeting rooms needed (virtualization of collaboration)
• No organization charts (we create in ad-hoc open environments with people we never met before)

Killing me softly

Killing me [my company] softly with no innovation can be defended by opening the gates for multitalented crowds to participate and share their ideas, experiences, and skills. We're moving towards open door creativity where customers, clients, and partners have a central role in the design of killer applications and sustainable business ideas.

As we know, goals play a huge factor in personal and business success. Look at the most successful people in business and industry. Do they set goals? They do, but what are the goals we've to set for the future sustainable future development of Europe and a more peaceful world.

Opening Europe

The economic conditions in Europe, on the globe, and this country [Finland]  is presenting challenges for many traditional industries and enterprises. The post-depression marketplace will undergo dramatic changes and many industrial enterprises are downscaling to adapt.

• car manufacturing has to reduce capacity
• forest industry, pulp and paper are downscaling in Europe
• the mobile gadgets industry is not growing like in the past, new products and services are needed
• music industry has to adapt to Internet as a distribution and marketing channel
• engineering, construction, building, renovation markets are facing financing challenges
• the possibilities of growth are in Russia, China, India, South America, Asia...

The mobile phone was the big Finnish break-through in the 90's. We're now ready to launch the next big thing - open innovation, co-creation and collaboration on a global scale - as a method for new wealth creation. Sounds strange that something called "open" promises to deliver "innovations" to maximize future profits, but continue to challenge and motivate your organization to move towards:

• participation
• sharing of ideas and concepts
• provide open access to new ideas and opportunities
• collaboration and co-creation are attitudes for more cost-effective change management
• become a part of a much larger groups (crowdsourcing and multitalented problem solving)
• we've to be open minded, learn to use open platforms, and have to be ready to take risks

The wisdom of the crowd is needed

Globally, water consumption increases at more than twice the rate of population growth. There will be a shortage of Water, Money, Oil and Energy in many parts of the world.  A workforce of several hundred millions is waiting for whatever jobs available. If cheap energy helped fuel the boom in China and India, then a vanishing supply of fresh water will apply the brakes in the near future.

• Could open innovation play a role in solving these problems?
• Military power and command control isn't the only way towards democracy
• We ca do serious business with social media, but for proper use we need to re-think and re-engineer the way we used to work within the safety of four walls of the traditional organization in the past
• Is the management ready?
• How about the individuals?
• What will the corporate lawyers say?
• The company's security manual isn't written for open global collaboration

Digital Documentation and Distribution

I like to give some examples where "Open Innovation and Collaboration" has been applied unconsciously. The first one is about a Power plant where the user started to use different biomass compositions to avoid the mixing procedure of peat, bark, wood chips, sawdust, planning residues. The mixing would be an additional work and require more storage space. The supply of biomass isn't stable and consistent either.

The power plant owner and operator started to burn unmixed residues and to make manual adjustments. The supplier learned about the new evolution and ideas about programming and the use of machine vision to determine what residues were delivered to the heating plant. PLC Logic changed rotation speed of burning chamber and the air supply increased the efficiency of the process.

This is a "prosumer" [produce and consumer] collaboration example resulted in a better operational practice through a trial and error process. The plant owner and manufacturer were in continuous contact and by accident they learned about the unconventional operation and as a result they were supporting the development of a more practical operational model. The manufacturer is now able to deliver turnkey plants with multiple biomass species.

A tightly regulated and controlled power plant operation according to specifications would have taken a much longer time to evolve. It's not a good idea to play by the books and agreements. Innovations are born when people start to work without the operating manual or agreement.

There will be more examples later: IKEA, Unicode, Big projects...

Helge V. Keitel

KK-Net

helgekeitel at gmail.com

+ 358 50 309 2021

Direct Digital Distribution

One day,  we’re promoting on the the Web, people are choosing products and services from digital boards, payments are transferred through the Internet.

On-demand transport can be scheduled according to requests expressed in digital order forms.

This isn’t futuristic Sci-Fi visioning, it’s a quote from a post dated 15.06.1996 at 17h12.

The weak or early warning signals of Internet as a business environment was described in a post to a business associate in Tampere.

We’d a meeting about this subject before our departure to France. It has to be mentioned that the meeting wasn’t very successful. Our ideas weren’t of this planet at that time.

It might be a good idea to suggest a follow-up meeting with the same people today ;)

I’ll be speaking in Tallinn May 25, 2010

Microblogging is fun. Qaiku is one of the Finnish services taking it mainstream. Before this we had Jaiku.

Everybody knows Twitter and Facebook but the Finnish Qaiku is much more advanced for those who want to interact, report and advance open innovation.

Why is managing technical people difficult? I had this question on of my blogs.

Some would say tech people are socially inept to adopt social media and some don't communicate well.

While that may be true in some cases, saying so doesn't help managers deal with social media in a better way.

The solution is learning by doing. I’ll be speaking at Tallinn BlogFest 2010 May 25, 2010. Take a look at the details here.

iTraining as a Spin-off from the innovaatiojuna

information to understand the essential problem

Target definition by 1000 characters, picture and graphics

reality orientation through primary evaluation

action taken to improve the understanding

innovation based on available information

networking to increase the scope of problem solving

interaction within the group, social media and other communities to boost quality of problem solving

normalization and adaption to reality

global development in collaboration with best resources available

Kerava going Mobile on day

Kerava did have a hidden role in the preparation of the innovaatiojuna trip to Oulu. We’d a meeting with Seppo where the Future Store Concept was discussed.

Today, I learned that there are one million square meters of free office space in the Helsinki region. That’s three times more than what could be regarded as “normal”.

Kerava is about 20 minutes by commuter train from the Helsinki central railway station. Our mobile meeting started here and we moved forward to Porvoo.

The Kerava mobility is symbolized by all the bikes outside the railway station.

We would love to be a very innovative nation

Tekes boosts the development of the Finnish information society by technological means and through innovation. That sounds great. What does it mean in practice?

Tekes - the Finnish Funding agency for Technology and Innovation is the main public funding organisation fore research and development (R&D) in Finland. Tekes funds industrial projects as well ass projects in research organisations, and especially promotes innovative, risk-intensive projects (Eur 469 million in 2007). Tekes offers partners from abroad a gateway to the key technology players in Finland

Tekes strategy focus ares, People - Economy - Environment, outline future priorities for innovation in Finland.

Tekes intends to encourage innovation innovation in areas defined on the basis of clear user need - in fields such as ICT, health and wellbeing, business models and services.

Source: ICT Cluster Finland Review 2008.

Starbucks Plans Return to Its Roots - New York Times

Starbucks Plans Return to Its Roots - New York Times: "Also on Wednesday, Starbucks introduced a new online community, mystarbucksidea.com, where Mr. Schultz and other managers will contribute to a corporate blog. Customers will also be encouraged to visit the site to make suggestions and interact with employees. The site opens on Thursday.

Helge: Executives blogging and socializing with customers is a new move. Social Media has been great for smaller companies. We can also "interact with the employees".

Looking further ahead, Mr. Schultz said that the company planned to introduce health- and wellness-related food and drinks and energy beverages later in the year.

Helge: Wellness seems to be a megatrend. I guess Starbucks is right.

Wednesday’s meeting represents what Mr. Schultz hopes will be a striking turnaround in the speed and spirit of innovation at Starbucks. In the first half of the decade, the company thrived on product introductions like the Frappuccino, a frozen coffee drink. The last innovation widely thought to be successful was the Cinnamon Dolce Latte — in early 2006.

Helge: The spirit of innovation has to consider that Wi-Fi wan't bring clients to Starbucks. Mobile broadband is going to give added freedom for laptop-coffee-lovers to choose the places they are spending their lunchtime or coffee pauses.

Mr. Schultz partly has his own relentless ambition to blame for the woes at Starbucks. In the last two years, citing ever-larger expansion goals, the company doubled its number of stores to more than 15,000 in 44 countries — many in comically close proximity to one another and to competing coffee shops.

Helge: Hmmm, don't know much about that

Analysts say new stores cannibalized traffic from existing stores and thinned the ranks of well-trained Starbucks managers and employees. The company then tried to create efficiencies among stores, adding technology like massive automated espresso machines, which have little of the romance or aroma of the old hand-operated machines."

Helge: Change Management for a big company isn't easy. Are we going towards an era of greater diversity?

Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times: "MENLO PARK, Calif. — “It’s crazy to say you will only grow through innovation,” Larry Ellison, the hard-charging chief executive of Oracle, was telling me last week. “It’s bizarre that there’s a stigma to buying something rather than building it yourself.”

Helge: You can innovate with money.

Here in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurialism is a religion, people have long taken a dim view of acquisitions. A big purchase was, as Mr. Ellison put it, “a confession that there’s a failure to innovate.”

Helge: Buy yourself into innovations!

That is until Mr. Ellison decided about four years ago to go Rambo on this high-tech province of button-downs and khakis with a hostile $10.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft. At first, the bid was considered barbaric. Everyone said Mr. Ellison was bound to fail. After all, as they love to say here, a technology company’s most valuable assets — its engineers — walk out the door every evening. And with a hostile bidder circling, PeopleSoft’s engineers were bound to run. Only they didn’t."

Helge: Changing from one home to another...What happens with the Yahoo and Microsoft marriage?

Innovating over Internet

The Internet is becoming real now in a way it has never been before. You can take your talk, pictures, movies and text presentations to your customers in real time. Powerpoint presentations don't have to happen in a meeting room. A sales talk can be delivered for on-demand downloading. However, I would say that the real thing is to do things live from a distance.

The Web is becoming the main medium in which consumers engage to get information and to communicate. You can see this happening in advertising, you can see it happening in telecom, video with YouTube, with music, with newspapers and magazines.

"It is all shifting en masse, and all consumers are basically moving over to the Internet. We all talked about it in the 1990s, but it didn’t happen then. Those were just experiments. But now it is really happening," Tells Marc Andresseen to Spiegel February 22, 2008

Silicon Valley Innovation Institute

Silicon Valley Innovation Institute: "SVII 'First Wednesday' Innovation Society Meeting

Venue: Bay Cafe, Bayshore Ballroom, Palo Alto

Invite your friends and colleagues, and join us for the SVII Innovation Society 2008 Series Innovation Perspectives from Around the World:

Panel discussion with worldly members of the Innovation Society. Moderated by Sue Lebeck and Howard Lieberman.

Join us as we discover what Innovation Society members observe as they work with innovators and innovation managers from around the world. Discover perspectives from Japan, Belgium, Spain, China, Pakistan, and elsewhere, as we enjoy this lively panel discussion with:

• Kimberly Wiefling, consultant and innovation teacher
• Francine Gordon, innovation teacher
• Tom Buckholtz, business advisor
• Max Sims, industrial designer
• Farrukh Shah Khan, technology programming producer

Learn about our colleagues' globe-hopping projects. Listen to what they have discovered while working with distinct innovation cultures.

Hear about cultural attitudes toward innovation, innovators, idea-development, intellectual property, risk management, funding and more.

Discover the unique innovation challenges -- or advantages -- that might exist in other innovation communities. Please join us for the conversation. See you there!"

Helge: I've to follow from a distance. It's a long way to Palo Alto. Would love to be there.

ABC News: Has MySpace Jumped the Shark?

ABC News: Has MySpace Jumped the Shark?: "'Are you on MySpace?'

Helge: I've an MySpace account since 2005 but i don't use it. First I felt it was for young people. Now I forget it and don't have the time.

For those college-age or older, the answer may be increasingly no, coupled with a smirk, a roll of the eyes, and a withering 'No way. MySpace is for sexual predators.' Story MySpace to Further Open to Developers.

Helge: I did drop in the gender (age) gap.

While MySpace has at least twice the traffic and more users than its biggest competitor, Facebook, the younger site is clearly capturing the cachet so crucial to making a social network successful.

Helge: It's still big, yes.

'Facebook is the company to watch, while MySpace is falling off the radar,' Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told ABCNEWS.com. 'MySpace is increasingly irrelevant. Unless they change that, they'll go the way of Netscape or Friendster or any number of other Web properties.'

Helge: What comes after Facebook. It was the big hit of 2007.

But even if MySpace is no longer the hippest site on the block, according to industry experts, it's not going down without a fight.

Helge: Innovation expected.

Although MySpace launched first, historically, the site has lagged far behind Facebook in innovations. While Facebook opened up its site to developers months ago, MySpace will just begin doing that next week."

Helge: Yes, I agree.

Ten Talking Points for Davos

Ten Talking Points for Davos: "Ten Talking Points for Davos. Wikinomics author Don Tapscott outlines 10 issues, many centered around the potential of Web 2.0, that he'll discuss at the World Economic Forum by Don Tapscott Innovation & Design.

• A New Model for Green Design
  
• What's Really on the Davos Agenda
• A Better Way To Track the Economy
• Masters of Collaboration
• Phoning from the Edge

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The theme of this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos (Jan. 22-27) is 'Collaborative Innovation.' Important developments in information technology, demographics, business, and society are enabling new paradigms in collaboration in the global economy and leading to profound changes in every institution.

Companies, governments, educational institutions, and others can now orchestrate capability, innovate, and create value for their stakeholders in new ways. Collaborative innovation may hold the solution to many of the vexing problems facing our shrinking planet."

Helge: We apply this in several areas like biotechnology, microbiology, biotouch, bioenergy, medical electronics, real estate, market research, and of course collaborative innovation itself.

Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer, Creative Sage

Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer, Creative Sage(tm)/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates.

Cathryn writes, "I'd really be interested in your thoughts, as I work as a management consultant and executive coach, and my specialty areas are creativity and innovation (in organizations, creative project teams, and individuals); and marketing and public relations. I work with companies, trade associatiions and nonprofits. All of them are concerned about the large number of people of my generation—and Gen Y's parents, the baby boomers—who will be retiring in the next decade, and what that will mean for the world's workforce. So, I'd like to hear the opinions of the young people who will be coming up in the workforce concerning work, careers, money, and what you're looking for from your job or career—what qualities, in addition to a good salary?"

Helge: We are in the same business. I need to talk more with Seppo about some of the evolutions in the San Fransisco Bay area.

Cathryn continues, "I also work with professionals who want to redefine "retirement" and live an accomplished, creative life after leaving a corporate job, perhaps starting their own business, writing a book, exploring an artistic talent, traveling around the word, or developing a meaningful project to help other people, animals, or the environment. So, I work with people of different ages who want to enhance their creativity and do something extraordinary, whether through work or another pursuit."

Helge: We've twittered about future clean tech and rural villages developments. I guess social media can expand out of the talk and dialog mode to something more specific. Innovations need to have some limits and border lines. It's easier to create a future village than to change the whole world. All big things start small.

Strategic Innovation Consulting and New Product Development Strategy

Helge: Stumbled upon this company shortly after a discussion about Innovation Strategies involving VC's in Silicon Valley.

Strategic Innovation Consulting and New Product Development Strategy: "InnovationPoint is a non-traditional management consulting firm focused on Strategic Innovation. We help organizations achieve business breakthroughs that grow the topline - through opportunity identification, new business creation, strategy development and new product, service and category innovation.

We help our clients build sustainable innovation capability by addressing strategic, organizational and cultural challenges. Based on our Silicon Valley heritage, we understand real innovation. Our firm's leaders come from industry, having driven innovation internally at companies including HP, 3M, Nestlé, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Frito-Lay among others."

People and Innovation

How can we become more innovative?

1. Why are people the source of innovation?
2. The roadblocks to innovation
3. The innovative products and services
4. The fear of failure is the major barrier to innovation
5. Challenges with innovation with own employees and business partners
6. Collaboration beyond the average level is very important
7. Building connections inside and outside organizations
8. How can we build an innovation fostering organizations?
9. Encouraging
10. What are important to focus on?
11. People love to participate
12. They need the support and the air cover
13. People can take risks
14. Traditional views of diversity
15. People who look at things from a different ways
16. Key connectors: they bring in other people
17. The informal networks
18. How to increase the visibility of ideas
19. How to leverage ideas with practice
20. Social networks
21. The emergence of large scale brainstorming events
22. The collective wisdom
23. Driving innovation
24. Jam sessions to drive ideas
25. Sponsor at top levels of the organizations
26. Going beyond the organizational walls
27. Intellectual property
28. How to facilitate these kinds of interactions?
29. It is a responsibility of a large group of leaders of the organization
30. Providing that ear cover for that innovative project
31. The role of the CEO
32. The line of business leaders
33. What does it mean for this business leader?
34. The talent management and have the right people in place
35. Need to have different type of infrastructure
36. There are a number of technologies to help to leverage
37. People and innovation!
    

European Union

This is a picture from last years IST 2006 Helsinki.

(8 October 2007) Universities and research institutions, companies, non-governmental organisations and individuals from across Europe and beyond have sent in more than 800 contributions to a public consultation on the future of the European Research Area.

While in-depth analysis of the responses is on-going, the main trend is clearly widespread support for the concept of a European Research Area (ERA) and its priorities, as outlined by the Commission in its Green Paper.

The responses also provide ideas on how to reinforce and extend the ERA. The consultation will continue at a high-level conference in Lisbon on 8-10 October. The Commission aims to come forward with proposals in specific areas in 2008.

Helge: EU has succeeded to embed innovation into a multiple layers of bureaucracy.

What’s Innovation got to do with it?

What’s Innovation got to do with it?: "“Innovation is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy.” Writes The Economist.

News From my colleague [Creatvie Saga], Jeff De Cagna, of Principled Innovation: Innovation continues to be a top priority for leaders in all sectors of the global economy, yet actually making innovation happen remains a profound challenge for many organizations. What’s more, the new dynamics of a rapidly-changing, Web-enabled global marketplace are shifting how we think about innovation itself.

If you would like to better understand the current state of innovation thinking and practice, as well as the emerging trends that will shape the future of innovation, join some of the Web’s top innovation bloggers for the first-ever Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum on April 26, 2007.

Here is the Forum line-up as of right now, and my colleague, Jeff De Cagna, of Principled Innovation, will be adding more bloggers. I have signed up to participate in the forum, as I’m also an Innovation Journalist, as well as an Innovation program designer, management consultant and executive coach."

The European Innovation Dialogue

Innovation is a strategic priority

Innovation has become a strategic priority for regional policy. Strategies formulated in Brussels are as good as they are implemented by the member states, regions and cities. Local and regional authorities and innovation stakeholders dispose of a set of resources and tools which are crucial to successful innovation. Considerable efforts should therefore be made to creating an environment that encourages innovation on the ground.

How to encourage innovation on the ground?

- How should we meet to innovate?

- What kind of platforms should we use?

- How should we build the communities and networks?

Structural funds 2007 - 2013

The next generation of structural funds during the period 2007 to 2013 is designed to allocate an important budget that allows enhancing the innovation strategies at the regional level considerably. Also there is a greater flexibility to combine the various innovation-related funding budgets. In order to make the best out of the funds available, the innovation stakeholders from the public and private sector have an inherent interest in collaborating towards achieving the best possible results.

- Collaboration

- Achieving the best results

The design of the agenda

The design of the event agenda is based on an a priori analysis of the situation regarding the innovation ecosystem in the region in question, innovation actors, their problems and the potential of the system. A close partnership with the major local actors is another crucial element that guarantees not only to set the agenda right but also to have the right people on board.

- The innovation ecosystem

- Innovation actors

- A close partnership with local actors

The added value

The added value of the event however depends on its outcome and the concrete results and recommendations that are elaborated. In order to have the broadest possible participation, the conference is followed-up by a consultation procedure involving the wider innovation community.

The final results serve as input for future innovation strategies, measures and projects which can be used to address national, regional and European policy makers but also the innovation system and its actors themselves.

Al Gore Silicon Valley

Gore says he's on a campaign "more important" than presidential Speaking at the Silicon Valley Joint Venture event in San Jose, Calif., former Vice President Al Gore said there's still time to combat the expected effects of climate change. He said the investment and innovation that built the high-tech and biotech industries is now needed for green tech.

• Silicon Valley can change the world
• Al Gore speaking in the video

Take a look at Demo.

Ist 2006 Helsinki - the end

The IST 2006 Helsinki event is over. We closed the exhibition at 4 pm today. I'm now at Radisson SAS and waiting for participants to the dinner we have with core team. We expect about 15 people to show up.

We had a very international group at the CONSEN stand and had the opportunity to discuss the importance of collaborative intelligence and open source collaboration on an European and Global Scale. The team members from:

1. Spain
2. United Kingdom
   
3. China
4. Romania
5. Italy
6. Estonia
7. Lithuania
8. Georgia
9. Greece
10. Russia
11. France
12. Israel
13. USA
14. Finland
15. Germany
16. Portugal
17. Denemark
18. etc.