The right first use case - Open Innovation in a Global Systems Integrator world

Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software Is Eating the World” essay in The Wall Street Journal about have a decade ago and it is still true.

In this WEF 2012 insight video of 2012, Henry Chesbrough rightly talks about leveraging external ideas and technology to reduce costs and time spent in research and, more crucially, from inside out, making unused innovations more accessible to external users. However, the challenge all starts with a change that as a large organization you need to bring in to be able to create an ecosystem that allows acceleration on disruptive ideas along with careful curation of internal ones to a product or a service.

After collaborating and creating value with startups globally, I had lots of thoughts on arriving at one mechanism of working in the open innovation ecosystem, but ended up realizing that there it all boils down to what I refer to as - The right first use case.

Lets talk about it in detail around what typically works and what does not. This article is written from a IT services organisation perspective and may/ may not be true for you but if you have feedback around it, do give me a buzz.

"The future of innovation: startups and corporates to work under one roof by 2025"

Open Innovation is not a term that is new but has been existent since decades. It is now that we have seen its relevance even more. According to a recent research conducted by Cologne - Unilever foundry there were 3 conclusions that stood out when studying the startup and corporate collaboration :

• 80% of corporates believe that startups can have a positive impact on a large company’s approach to innovation
• 46% of startups who have not worked with corporates are likely to do so in the future
• 89% of startups believe they’re able to deliver business solutions which can scale

Now, the question is why startups ? Startups bring to the table what is gets blurred in a corporate, i.e. point solutions, new technologies, and most important - agility ensuring there is rapid prototyping of ideas and solutions.

On the other hand, whilst you have enterprise scale with corporates, the quantum of change becomes slow simply because there are protocols, the need of taking risk averse decisions at every single point in time, and ofcourse tends to become bureaucratic at times.

How do you work ? The term "Open Innovation" is not new at all. Corporate Accelerators , incubators, venture fund, innovation garages and hackathons are the general route followed by any corporate, but the question is - does making one ensure you co-create ? You need to speak the same language.

I've been hearing both sides of the story for sometime now. Corporate businesses demanding the lack of availability by startups for the need of co-creating has been a challenge due to the limited bandwidth due to obvious reasons. On the other hand, startups have started to limit their engagement with corporates citing a longer sales cycle. Well - the answer never is to stop working rather is on how to evolve and engage effectively. Who doesn't need quicker market access, rapid scale and customer validation - all available at one location ? Also, who doesn't need promising new solutions, emerging technology innovation and an exponential outcome ?

I'd like to divide the ways of working in 3 simple steps :

• Stay hungry - Identify gaps, problems, feature sets that are missing from an existing solution or go greenfield - asses the market and incubate an emerging tech offering as an opportunity. We now have some companies who even help you with intelligent insights and this is a major add-on to your research so - partner with them.
• Scout is a term that can be used interchangeably. Try seeing how the business problems or gaps are addressed with more co-creation means, i.e involve startups, the venture community, and even academia. Focus on the value add that each stakeholder brings to the table. Do have a due-diligence framework in place but keep in crisp and concise.
• Start small but focused - develop rapid time bound rapid prototypes and engage with the customer directly. Once proved, leverage the power of scale to realize benefits across industries.

It all brings down to industrializing the solution, protecting the startup, marketing and leveraging the ecosystem from time to time and in the process I've learnt how to commercially work out across each model of engagement to create a win-win scenario.

Keep co-creating !

If you have worked in this environment, do share your thoughts- I'd love to hear. How have you bridged gap between corporate and disruptors ?