Henry Chesbrough, the Father of Open Innovation, believes that in the future innovation communities will push the boundaries of Open Innovation.
In the 1980s, as Henry Chesbrough studied companies as varied as computer disk manufacturer Quantum Corporation, Lucent, Cisco and Xerox Corporation and its Palo Alto Research Center , it dawned on him that the days of traditional firm-centric innovation were over. It was time for companies to look beyond their boundaries for new sources of innovation.
Q. When you talk about it, it make one wonder whether something like this within the GE system could eventually become as big or as important as InnoCentive (an Open Innovation intermediary spun out of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly)? Do you know what the internal thinking on this is within the GE?
Q. InnoCentive came with a bang about 10 years ago. Yet we still don’t see too many innovation intermediaries like them.
A lot of these things you can do to take things from the inside to the outside, in essence become options for the future. You have the opportunity, but not the requirement to do something. So, in many states of the world, the option is not worth anything and all it will cost you is whatever it took to write the option initially. But in other states of the world, that option may prove to be very valuable. So if water becomes very scarce and expensive, a waterless technology might become very valuable, and it wouldn’t in other states of the world. Different states of the world have different outcomes, and different options are going to be useful. A company like GE can and should have multiple options in play, so that whatever state of the world emerges, they’ve got some ways that advantage them, that they wouldn’t have had if they’d put those out there.
Q. What do you think about that? Are they really the patent troll they are accused of being?
[This article has been reproduced with permission from CKGSB Knowledge, the online research journal of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), China's leading independent business school. For more articles on China business strategy, please visit CKGSB Knowledge.]