The Solver’s Edge

Filippo Ronzani and John Ong, a Seeker: In open innovation, strategy and culture coexist

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Hello solvers,

I’m your host Iliriana Kacaniku and in this episode I’m talking to Filippo Ronzani and John  Ong. Filippo heads open innovation operations and John is an engineer with De Nora,  the Italian multinational company that specializes in water treatment solutions. De Nora is the world’s leading provider of equipment, systems, and processes for water disinfection and filtration.

Though many of us may be learning for the first time, De Nora is a champion of open innovation, having opened up its innovation process in varying levels and modalities since the 1960s.

I had the pleasure of talking to Filippo and John and learning about what it means to innovate in a hard to change and asset-intensive industry  - an industry in which change is costly for both the company and stakeholders in this ecosystem.   I learned a lot, but three things stood out on how open innovation enables change:

  1. Adopt an open innovation strategy - Open innovation requires a strategy, because without it, one is not going to go far. This indicates that in open innovation, culture does not eat strategy for breakfast. Rather, they reinforce each other.  Strategy gives direction on how to both innovate and open innovate, while culture, with its self-catalyzing power creates an enabling environment for open innovation adoption  and strategy execution.
  2. Open innovation enables low-cost low-risk pursuit of innovations that maintain market relevance for the seekers in increasingly faster changing industries, and
  3. In order to maximize the benefits of open innovation, the seekers need to tread outside the boundaries of home-industry or even the well-known processes.

    4. What about you? What did you learn about open innovation in hard-to-change industries? Do you have an example to share? If so, we’d love to hear from you.  So email us at  [email protected].

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    The Solver’s EdgeBy Kaptivate LLC