10 Insights from a Cambridge Open Innovation seminar – and particularly from Unilever’s approach

Posted: April 22nd, 2010 | Author: martijn | Filed under: co-creation, open innovation | Tags: Cambridge, co-creatie, co-creation, open innovatie, open innovation, Seminar | 2 Comments »

Open Innovation is hot. Companies, organizations and practitioners all over the world are doing it or experimenting with it. At the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge some 20 people gathered for a one-day exchange of experiences and viewpoints. Open Innovation managers were present from amongst others Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Akzo Nobel, Premier Foods, BAT – as well as people from IfM and NESTA – the UK 100 man-strong innovation agency.

This is what I have learned:

1. There is not one right way in Open Innovation

2. For each company and industry OI ‘maturity’ should be assessed

3. Measures and targets are individual and hard to set, but

4. Ambitious targets do exist (P&G, Unilever)

5. The value of of OI is it benefits divided by it costs

6. This equitation changes when calculating this for both partners in OI

7. OI has yet to bridge Marketing, Innovation and R&D functions – to start with

8. Experimenting with OI is key in order to build best practices

9. Involving the consumer / end-users is largely unexplored terrain by OI in R&D

10 . The use of New & Social Media can deliver great new results

QUOTES

Some great quotes from the day:

- “Open Innovation is a contact sport”

- “You don’t own your reputation”

- “Open Innovation is done for Love, Fame, Glory, Money, Need and Obsession”

- “You can’t unmeet people”

During the morning presentations, interesting concepts and experiences where presented by various speakers. To highlight one; Harry Barraza from Unilever talked about:

WHY?

Why Open Innovation? Why is Unilever using it? Simply to get:

- Bigger,

- Better &

- Faster results

STAGES

In what stages is OI used at Unilever? It is mostly used now in the R&D phase through a number of OI collaborations with suppliers, partners, stakeholders, start-ups, ventures and NGOs. This is called the Discover phase.

- Discover phase – OI now being rolled out globally. Part of it are 14 ‘fields to lead’ that have to deliver in 3 years

- Design phase – OI used sometimes

- Deplay phase – OI not present

My take-out from Unilever’s unbalanced use in phases is that there is a huge potential for creating a more holistic OI approach including people from Marketing, Sales, Strategy, even HR and Finance – rather than having it sitting in R&D, Innovation and Procurement.

PROCES

How does one realise Open Innovation capabilities and opportunities? A model created by Gene Slowinski is used by Unilever and many other companies.

- WANT – define company needs (strategy, objectives)

- FIND – scout parties (search, network, 3rd party scouting, collaborations)

- GET – engage with parties (IP, contracts, business models)

- MANAGE – build a business (integrate, sales, marketing, finance)

The discussion around scouting parties came up many times during the day. Who is the right partner for us? What technology will become big? How do I find small companies? How do I keep myself from collaborating with the same partners?

PEOPLE

How is it organized internally? In order to spread the OI skills, processes & culture people an OI structure has to be created. That way OI thinking can be replicated. Unilever has chosen a top-down distributed approach where ultimately anyone in the company could be engaged in a form of OI. The process started 6 years ago. This are the levels:

- 10 Thought Leaders – OI advanced training, dedicated personnel, reporting to CTO, kick-starting and heading OI projects

- 100 Lead Users – OI basic training, involved in projects

- 1000 Practitioners – OI participants

- 100.000 People who will somehow have heard of it

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