Classical vs. Open Innovation

When practicing open innovation, problems aren’t approached in the classical manner of a closed workgroup but made accessible and attractive for many people that potentially could contribute to the solution. Since workgroups practising classical innovation naturally are using external information and partly cooperating with workers outside the workgroup too it only makes sense that there is no such thing as a “closed innovation”. Because innovation is a recombination of things already existing whereas the way of the combination makes the innovation. Therefore it’s not always easy to draw a clear line between conventional and open innovation.

Nevertheless there’s a crucial difference between the two ends of this spectrum stretching from the isolated person with only his mind to the whole world working together. Let’s say a video game developing company wants to bring out a second part of a game that performed very well. Obviously it has creative minds hired in the production process, otherwise the game probably wouldn’t have performed the way it did. But wouldn’t it be naive to think that they couldn’t output a much better second game when gathering and considering user feedback and input on the whole setup and realization of the game compared to if they didn’t? And let alone if they made this whole process of crowdsourcing ideas much more efficient by doing a challenge and rewarding the best contributors with money!

The more efficient a company can get access to knowledge and imagination and make use of it, the more successful the innovation process. Naturally internal workers produce much less diverse and potentially worse suggested solutions when working in their closed group on their own as if they would have made the problem accessible to the public (or at least to certain public groups). In the second case there are simply more resources to be capitalized on.

The Crowdsourcing Concept

And it’s the internet that makes this kind of innovation possible because it allows huge crowds of people with similar interests of any kind to get together in suitable networks and pursue their objectives – not only of entertaining purpose but also to address very real problems of course. And ultimately it is not only those innovation processes referred to as “open innovation” that in fact base on the concept of crowdsourcing – because any kind of feedback or inspiration could and also should be called “open innovation”.

As with all new technologies or methods that replace old models also crowdsourcing – where properly implemented – displays a greater economic efficiency. In a time where – especially internet-based – companies have to compete with the whole world, progress keeps accelerating and innovation pressure keeps increasing, open innovation may no longer be just a nice opportunity but become more and more a necessity.

Swiss Innovation Pool AG

In every company there is some kind of feedback and input from the customer side, so this principle is working all the time. But not always do companies fully benefit from the potential that open innovation has. The way to go to make use of this potential is by creating an open innovation challenge – with money as the prize, because money is a very large motivation factor and will probably remain it for quite some time. Of course conservative minds will call open innovation a risky thing – but there are huge potentials. Hereby it immediately becomes clear that it’s important how well such an open innovation is set up: How high should the price money be? Where should it be published? Are the criteria of participation well defined? Do the costs match the expected results?

We, Swiss Innovation Pool AG, believe we can solve almost any challenge faster and cheaper with the wisdom of the crowd. You define your problem and decide how much this problem is worth solved and we provide the ecosystem and support you with the setup of your open innovation project. To find out more, go to our shop.