Open Innovation Killer

Dr Judy was a worried woman. She was the Chief Scientist and leading a group of scientists working on the next generation product for her company. But, today, she came to know that her nearest rival competitor has launched a revolutionary product which, in tests so far, is looking much better than their product. She knew that this was going to affect her company's market share. She needed to react and react quickly at that!!! Time was of the biggest essence.

She immediately called for an emergency meeting of her company's senior most scientists and decided to brainstorm on the options available now, given this new development. After heated discussions for nearly 2 hours, the top two options that lay before her on the table with the pros and cons of each option were as follows:

First Option

1. Develop a rival product on the same lines as the competitor.

Pros:

• Flexibility in designing and ensuring that more features are offered than the competitor’s thereby capturing the market again.

Cons:

• Time to market could be an issue.
  
• Run the risk of being seen as a market follower rather than a leader

Second Option

2. Use the same underlying technology as the rival company product but innovate on the business model or supporting features

Pros:

• Can launch pretty quickly

Cons:

• May need to sort out any IP issues.
  
• May need to work through how this will be integrated with other internal products.
  

Tough decision to make, eh? What will you decide?

Anyway the purpose of introducing this story was not to help you make a decision. We probably need more information and data before deciding. But it was to talk about a culture or mindset which is present in many organisations which does not even give Option 2 a good hearing but instead decide on Option 1 almost always. Why? Since they seem to be suffering from the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.

Not invented here syndrome is one of the single biggest killer of all Open Innovation initiatives. In simple words, it is the inability of the scientists to accept that good inventions and ideas can come from elsewhere, even outside the organisation. Instead they close themselves to such options firmly believing that internal options are always the best since they know the other supporting infrastructure the best.

Why is this worth discussing so much about?

Well – mainly for 2 reasons:

1. In today’s environment where funding is a big issue, we need to ensure that our energies are focussed on the right initiatives. Essentially only a few initiatives are going to be taken forward and we need to ensure that the right ones are selected.
   
2. The more internal focussed you are, the more you run the risk of developing products and solutions which are proprietary and cannot be easily integrated with other outside products. This will, at some stage, affect your ability to react quickly to market situations.
   

So you must be wondering – OK – I agree this sounds like a problem. So how do I go about solving it?

Frankly as all cultural changes, it is not going to happen overnight. It requires persistent reinforcement from the top management team. There should also be incentives given to teams to come up with solutions using outside inventions thereby giving more direction to the creative energies of the various teams.

So far so good - Now what we have been discussing so far is about incremental innovation projects which are typically majority of the projects out there. But once in a while, we do have an opportunity to work on “blue sky initiatives” where you have a chance to design an entire new innovative initiative from scratch. In such a scenario, again it makes sense to get some innovative ideas from the outside world? Frankly I would argue that this is not a choice but the only way to go. Why? Since this is the only way we can ensure that you are not stuck with similar set of thinking and to encourage real “out of the box” solutions. In fact the success of these initiatives is closely linked to how much you are able to come up with original ideas which stretches and rewrites all existing boundaries and assumptions.

So in summary, the top management team should be aware of this giant open innovation killer commonly known as the “Not Invented here” syndrome. If they see this pattern emerging on a continuous basis in the organisation thinking, they should be quick to take corrective action before it starts to kill all their open innovation initiatives.