Open Innovation - Doctors and Engineers

  In my recent post, about Paradigm Shift happening in Management I mentioned Open Innovation as one of the important foundations. Today I would like to reflect on some observations made during 3 last fascinating years when we worked together with our University partners: Silesian Unviersity of Technology and West Pomeranian University of Technology in iLoad project.

1. Doctors and engineers love to solve the problems
Yes, definitely it is in our blood: we love to identify and solve the problems. So first weeks and even months, the topic was “What can we improve about your products?”

Our products are good, they are designed to withstand certain load, they are equipped with the systems that prevent misuse and overloading. So, I kept on repeating my mantra – project like this is not about improving existing products. It is about finding a completely new way. If you can’t improve something by at least 30%, do not bother.

After some time we got the whole team aligned along much more far reaching targets than incremental improvements.

2. “Stress distribution” does not sell

During the course of research we found many interesting phenomena from academic point of view, but they were not so much interesting for the company., So we needed a few discussions where to put our focus. So sometimes I had to say – no, but stress distribution does not sell the product. Interestingly, this output-driven innovation turned out to be even more interesting from an academic point of view.

3. Developing new does not mean criticism of the old

Engineers would often question why we would develop new method if the current works fine. It is our human nature that we like things known to us. Proposing developing new method without a known outcome can be taken sometime as personal address. It took some time to convince engineers, that it is not about fixing problem with current method, it is normal process of scouting for new emerging technologies. In today’s fast paced world, reacting to problems when they are arising is a loser strategy. Every company with the goal  to be a leader in its business needs constantly to develop Platform for Innovation not only products.

4. Academia is not only generator of ideas

Typically one would imagine University as a source of break-through innovation. But what we discovered, is that it could actually work also as an transfer agent between different industries. We would not normally talk to the company that develops CNC machines. But Universities partner’s network is actually much bigger than typical industrial company. So it is not only about University to Company transfer. It is also Company A – via University – Company B type of transfer.

These are some kind of interesting observations along the project. Do you recognize some of the issues even in the daily work, without external partners?