OpenUp2Innovate

By OMIND platform GmbHBusiness Education Self-Improvement Careers

OpenUp2Innovate episodes

August 20, 2022 Open Innovation in public media
Open Innovation in media
How open is innovation at public broadcasters?
Today we discuss Open Innovation (OI) at public broadcasting companies in Germany. A topic that has not really been dealt with up until now. As part of Sophie's research, she tried to answer two questions:
“To what extent does public broadcasting practice OI?”
“Which requirements does public broadcasting need to fulfill in order to be able to optimally implement OI?”
Differences between the broadcasters
Large public broadcasting firms have the financial means to look beyond company boundaries and try out different innovation practices but because of their size, there are still many structures slowing them down, flat hierarchies and systematic knowledge management is difficult to establish.
Small public broadcasting firms have an open corporate culture, in which internal knowledge exchange is a matter of course and necessary. Hierarchies are sometimes less pronounced, which means that managers are much closer to the editors. However, they lack the means and influence to transfer this exchange of knowledge to externals or to other broadcasting firms and make a difference.
Obstacles to OI
A very homogeneous workforce in terms of education and social background.
Inhibitions to move outside the public-broadcasting cosmos.
BUT
Tendencies that the public broadcasters open up, begin to work in an interdisciplinary way and think outside the box, can be found.
The focus of the new offerings is increasingly on social media which has a positive effect on the possibilities of conducting OI together with the users.
Possible solutions
Integrating a systematic OI strategy and also connecting it to HR. It is important to create a conducive environment for the people to engage in OI.
More diversity within the staff. Building more cross functional teams with people with different cultural and functional backgrounds, education, age and gender.
15 min
June 05, 2022 The importance of an Open Innovation Mindset
New Findings on the Open Innovation Mindset
In todays episode we talked to OMIND intern Clara about the importance of the strategic promotion of an open innovation mindset among employees at different organizational levels
Her research questions
- What commonalities can be identified in the establishment of an open innovation culture by external consultants in and between the industries?
- How can this potential be used to develop a business model for OMIND consulting that enables sustainable value innovation?
Main takeaways
The most common conception on innovation was the awareness regarding the need for change towards a more open corporate culture and a more intensive collaboration with educational institutions, startups and suppliers.
Barriers to establishing an open innovation culture were identified as an overload of employees in day-to-day business, which leaves neither space nor time for knowledge sharing.
Any questions? Feel free to contact us or Clara on LinkedIn!
30 min
November 13, 2021 Innovatorik und Open Innovation (german)
Special Episode – Innovatorik und Open Innovation
We invited Dirk Wirth, an innovation expert, to talk to us about the field "Innovatorik". It describes the combination of rhetoric and innovation. It's the ability to bring people to innovate.
Innovatorik and Open Innovation contribute to one another. You need an open mindset in order to successfully be a Innovatorik-person and be able to inspire others to innovate. On the other hand you need people who are talented at Innovatorik, in order to implement open innovation within an organization.
Dirk Wirth on Linkedin
"Das große Handbuch Innovation: 555 Methoden und Instrumente für mehr Kreativität und Innovation im Unternehmen" by Dirk With
51 min
September 27, 2021 Open Innovation and Sustainability
S2/EP1: Open Innovation and Sustainability
An interview with Felix Rossknecht, a consultant, speaker and mentor with whom we talked about sustainability and the important role of Open Innovation and employees.
This episode serves as a introduction episode to the second season of this podcast: Sustainability. While giving you a small overview and clarification on the terms, we also tried to connect the prior season on digitalization.
Our Takeaways
The GOAL is a sustainable business. Open Innovation can be the KEY to successfully implement sustainability into the business context. Digitalization can be used as a TOOL to pursue this goal.
When it comes to sustainable business it is important to know that there is a lot people can learn from one another. Nobody has to make up their own ways, but rather try to collaborate and ask for help! For that to happen you need an open mindset, fitting organizational culture and shared values. Its not important to get money out of all the innovations, its rather about creating a new big pie – regardless how big the share of each individual is. Long lasting relationships are the key to successful collaborations and a sustainable future.
Links
Felix Rossknecht on LinkedIn
44 min
August 26, 2021 Open Innovation in mittelständischen Unternehmen (German)
Special Episode: Open Innovation in mittelständischen Unternehmen
Christian Mohr is executive management board member and managing partner at UnternehmerTUM, the leading center for innovation and business creation in Germany. In this special episode we talked about middle-sized/ family owned companies and how different they deal with open innovation in comparison to bigger companies and start-ups.
Some family lead and middle-sized companies have been in business for decades and went quite well with their strategy. Through Corona though many were forced to rethink their business model and started to use digitalization and in some cases even broadened their way of thinking outside the firm's boundaries, hence use open innovation.
These companies have also a different and more down to earth set of values, which is deeply rooted in tradition and a sense of responsibility towards employees, who have been working in these companies for years and sometimes even generations. These values can sometimes hinder open innovation in terms of the willingness to try new things and take a risk, but can on the other hand be very helpful. Through the close connection and the smaller size, communication and idea generation within the company can be easier, which is an important factor for open innovation: when employees feel free to talk about ideas, it directly translates to the openness of companies to be able to share ideas across the firms' borders (for more information on that phenomenon read Human resources management and open innovation: the role of open innovation mindset by Engelsberger, A., Halvorsen, B., Cavanagh, J., & Bartram, T., 2021)
One of the biggest problems is, that many of these companies are scared of change. But in times of climate change, digitalization etc., this change is unavoidable, which makes these companies struggle. They are literally caught between tradition and adapting to their environment. Will they be able to sustain the close relationship to their employees and values, while adapting to the challenges of our time?
Christian Mohr on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christian-mohr-921b56b7
Website UnternehmerTUM: https://bc.unternehmertum.de
Engelsberger, A., Halvorsen, B., Cavanagh, J. and Bartram, T. (2021), Human resources management and open innovation: the role of open innovation mindset. Asia Pac J Hum Resour. https://doi.org/10.1111/1744-7941.12281
42 min
April 30, 2021Open Innovation and Team Management (German)
EP5 – Open Innovation and Team Management
How does a team with flat hierarchies help to encourage an open innovation culture?
We invited Julija Storz from freenet to talk to us about her views on team management. Here are some of the main lessons from the interview.
Challenges for interdisciplinary teams
People are coming together with different business-backgrounds and different mindsets. It is always a challenge to adapt to a lot of diverse people with various backgrounds.
Nobody is an absolute expert in any field. There is a huge dependence on external knowledge.
As everybody can easily take the lead and be more independent. But that means, that single employees tend to have more responsibility, which could be overwhelming at first.
How to adapt to digital transformation
Always listen to your employees and be aware of which tools they feel comfortable with.
The main goal is to always exchange knowledge.
3 success-factors to lead a self managed team with flat hierarchies
1. Trusting and have an open mindset regarding other people.
2. Give people their freedom as a team and individually, especially regarding personal skillset and experience.
3. Always give and be able to receive feedback, whether it is within the team or with stakeholders.
Julija Storz on Linkedin
44 min
March 26, 2021 How Open is Innovation?
Special Episode: How Open is Innovation?
Four master’s students from the University of Southern Denmark present the
Paper "How Open is Innovation? A Retrospective and Ideas Moving
Forward" by Linus Dahlander, David M. Gann and Martin W. Wallin, written
in 2020 and published in 2021.
What’s it about?
This paper analyses the last ten years of innovation and openness,
draws lessons, evaluates criticism and further papers, and concludes by
preparing us for another ten years of Open Innovation.
What has affected open innovation?
Technological development has had
a significant impact on how companies can benefit from Open Innovation (Artificial
Intelligence, Cloud Services, Robotics and APIs). These technologies allow
companies to change their business model. All this is related to the vast
amount of data that is constantly being generated. Data openness could
build bridges across organizations, but only a tiny part of data is used to
this end. Some organizations, such as Google, Facebook or Amazon, are just very
good at monetizing with data, but handling a lot of information might lead to privacy
violations and other issues.
Dark side of open innovation
It enables collaboration and value creation for some, but it could also
lead to exploitation and value destruction for others.
Among the technologies that impacted Open Innovation are APIs and login
services. They can facilitate interactions at a big scale, and they are
part of a rapidly growing market, and for this reason, some companies focused
their business models on them. But in some cases, this led to scandals and bad
situations. The case of Cambridge Analytica, which is very well known, had issues due to an excessive collection of
data.
Some issues can also be found in the volume of ideas generated through
crowdsourcing. Aligning the company's strategy with the crowds that generate
ideas could be challenging because of the attention deficit. Technology comes
to help in this case too. To cope with this, companies use different methods,
one of which is Artificial Intelligence, even though the limitation of AI is
the ability in evaluating brand new ideas, because of the way AI algorithms
are trained.
Crowdfunding
It has gained a considerable importance in the past ten years. We all know
its power to find funds for early-stage ideas, but we should also consider that
crowdfunding can generate only a tiny amount of funding compared to VC funds.
Nevertheless, its importance is linked to funding-generation and, most
importantly, to knowledge generation for the team. When a team posts a
content in a crowdfunding platform, they manage to collect information about
their potential customers.
And this links to information and data collection.
Importance of data
More than it was ten years ago, it is now clear that data has huge
importance for businesses, but it is still not easy for every company to
implement strategies based on data. Some very-well-known big tech companies,
such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, made their business models around data,
but this is not yet the case for smaller organizations.
It must also be understood that companies are still struggling to
effectively share data with big corporations due to the fear of an unbalanced
flux of information, such as the case of the German automotive industry and
Google Maps.
Therefore, one future research topic for Open Innovation researchers could
be to understand the balance between revealing data and capturing value from
data.
How can open innovation adapt to these changes and change the game itself?
When people adopt idea-sharing mindsets, open innovation can change
traditional industry boundaries.
For instance, the article highlights Tesla, who is shaping the battleground
for the new automotive industry.
They have acknowledged that they cannot drive the electric market forward
alone. In fact, Tesla has revealed intellectual property to seek the
advancement of electric vehicle technology to accelerate electric vehicles'
market size.
Ultimately, their ambition would be to improve their cars and stay ahead of
the competition, and so they engage in an open, collaborative culture to gain
inputs from the masses.
Furthermore, with this approach, Tesla states that they are willing to
cooperate with electric car companies to compete against the fossil car market.
How does technological development impact organizations?
Platforms are essential for today's organizational development and
facilitate how organizations create and capture value. And their impact is not
surprising. Platforms minimize barriers of distance and connect people and
create a network effect. This provides a space where information and ideas
can flow.
And successful platforms providers to grow larger and larger.
Are there any concerns?
It is difficult not to acknowledge the power that large IT corporations
have. They even own open-source platforms, with code
that is designed to be publicly accessible. Microsoft now owns “Github”,
“IBM” owns “Red Hat”. And while these large collaborations claim novel
commitment and intentions, it makes one reflect on how open open source really
is.
Can there be too much innovation, or can there be too
much openness?
Yeah, we need to reconsider how much openness is
appropriate and at the end of the day, it will be a trade-off that should be
handled carefully. The amount of openness goes hand in hand with patenting.
This can be a barrier to adopting open innovation.
There are many reasons that patents are a barrier to open innovation.
The article highlights over-valuing internal ideas and fear of being the one
revealing the new commercial blockbuster to potential competitors.
Many companies still have a "no patent - no
talk" mindset and therefore miss out on the benefits of broad and distant.
They might miss out on business opportunities: What values do patents have, if
they lay unused in a drawer? The pharmaceutical company “Bayer” employs 7.000
scientists, holds thousands of patents, many unused. And yet only two employees
are responsible for licensing out.
OPEN INNOVATION - the bigger picture and societal shift in openness
Current tensions between nations make it harder
to cooperate across borders, e.g. USA CHINA TRADE war. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45899310
In China, the CTO of “Aliba” said that we live in
the data age and that data could be processed better outside the
company.
The current crisis gave open innovation a boost,
exploration and collaboration among different institutes which did not
cooperate before.
The challenge is to carry this momentum into a post
covid world.
Why is it so important that we carry the momentum?
The importance of this momentum comes from the more
significant problems we have to solve, such as climate change. These problems,
which are not tangible, have high complexity and abstraction levels following
Rittel and Webber, are called wicked problems.
In the 2010 paper the focus was on company-specific
problems. But companies can have a significant impact on their environment. Yet,
another trend can be detected: We see a concentration in capabilities of
research due to the high cost of research equipment. A consequence of this is a
more multidisciplinary team.
This results in hotspots of research. The power
of this hotspot is the knowledge and motivation in one place. The downside of
this concentration is the downfall of collaboration among institutes.
Other challenges OI might face in the future
Define the value of open innovation overestimates
their contribution to a project, so it is a challenge to measure OI scrutiny.
A second challenge is that organizations have to place OI either in the
periphery or at the core of their business: Substitute vs complementarity.
The speakers:
Bolgac Gülen
Alessandro Pisanu
Carl Brockhausen
Steffen Henriksen
Literature:
Dahlander, Linus & Gann,
David & Wallin, Martin. (2021). How open is
innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward. Research Policy. 50.
10.1016/j.respol.2021.104218.
Rittel, H.W.J., Webber, M.M.
Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci 4, 155–169
(1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
18 min
March 10, 2021 Tools for Open Innovation
EP3: Tools for Open Innovation
Transcript:
As
promised, we will put theory into practice. Today we will be talking about the
paper “The
role of digital technologies in open innovation processes: an exploratory
multiple case study analysis” by Andrea Urbinati, Davide
Chiaroni, Vittorio Chiesa and Federico Frattini from 2018. The overall
question: What does a company need to do, in order to implement
digital technologies in an Open Innovation process?
The Tools
Big Data
Huge
amount of data, that can’t be handled with in a “normal” way. The correct
amount of bytes depends on the size of the company. In order to
handle big data, one needs analytical skills to extract value from this massive
amount of data.
Internet
of Things (IoT)
It’s the
technology to connect “things” via internet. Smart homes and wearables are real
life examples, because they exchange data via the internet from one object to
another.
Information
and Knowledge Management systems (IKM)
Creating,
sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization.
(e.g. eLearning platforms like "Moodle")
Cloud
Computing
The
Cloud! To put it as simple as possible: it’s an IT-Infrastructure made
available via internet. Normally it includes data capacities, computing power
or an application software (e.g. adobe programms, that also save your projects in
their cloud).
Product-Lifecycle-Management
– Systems
Systems
that withhold all the information and data regarding the life cycle of a
product - from the concept to the trash bin/ recycling bin. With these systems
one can also control the process of development and enable the redistribution
of workflows. Also crossfunctional teams can use these systems: One might be good in
CAD programs to do the mock up, the other one is an engineer and realises the
product and then there are administrators and such that do the distribution.
All these steps can be included in one PLM - System.
System of
Rapid Prototyping (SoRP)
SoRP (e.g. 3D printing technology), mainly revolves around prototype generation, test
design, refining and commercializing. Its most beneficial in the product
development phase, you can e.g. simultaneously develop several versions of the
same product and speed up the product offering.
Combining
the Tools
In order
to understand the significance of the different tools, you must understand,
that combined and used simultaneously, they give the organization additional
advantages in the Open Innovation process. For example, a proper Cloud
infrastructure must be installed in order to deal with Big Data. That means you
need good working computers and lots of storage to even benefit from other digital technologies.
Two other
tools working well together when it comes to product development is the System
of Rapid Prototyping and Product lifecycle systems, because SoRP enables saving
time on prototyping and PLM provides control over the product
lifecycle of said product.
How to
use them?
On the
organizational level it helps in reorganizing the Research and Development
units in data capacities and time management for example. They need to
restructure their way of financing digital investment, implement routine ways
for innovation activities and standardize technologies’ features.
But let’s
move on to the process of Open Innovation: There are three phases, that a
company has go through to enable Open Innovation. I will include a little
example just to make it more approachable: The generating of an idea, let’s say
a nurse droid, the development of the droid and the last phase would be the
commercialization of it, so bringing it to the people and the hospitals.
The
mentioned tools now need to be used tailored to the phase you find yourself in.
Examples
More and
more private hospitals invest in digital technology to monitor the patient’s
diagnostic-therapeutic pathway via electronic medical records. A hospital put
together a group of 20 to 25 people including doctors and nurses. This so
called task force was supposed to work with new digital tools to accelerate the
elaboration of information on their patients instead of using the traditional
clinical records on paper. In detail, they used Big Data and Cloud computing,
where they saved and analysed the information of their clients. In the end they
reduced the time on elaborating clinical records from three to four weeks to
four days from the patients’ discharge. On the OI process, let’s say
“timeline”, the technologies where used within the commercialisation phase, so
they where already using it on customers, their patients.
The
second example is of a company that tries to establish a unit called “Digital
Direction – unit” that responds directly to the CEO. Before this unit they used
site management, apps, social media etc., which helped different units to
communicate. First they planned to make a unit, that reorganized and put
together all these different platforms linked to digital technologies. In this
idea generating phase they mainly used Information and Knowledge Management
systems. By initiating this unit the company was following two main goals: They
wanted to digitalize the marketing and commercialization in order to get to
their final customers and they wanted to put the digitalization of sales
processes in the hands of sales. The next step, to achieve these goals, was to
overcome the technological and digital gap. We now arrived at the development
phase, where they integrated graduate programs for internal offices and
employees and of course digital training courses. Because the implementation of
digital technologies and the initiatives require experts in the field, they
need to be found as well.
The
technological transformation of the past years actually forces the companies to
adapt their research and development units. They now have to adapt their
innovation activities. In particular they do so by standardizing technologies’
features, to rethink their planned budget for digital investments and, as we
already reflected on, developing new and formalized procedures for innovation
activities.
Summary
To
summarize the findings of Andrea Urbinati et al. there are certain
steps a company needs to go through to enable Open Innovation and to really use
it to their advantage. For optimization of your digital processes, it is
advisable to form a unit that will be combining the different tools tailored to
the organizations needs, and where it stands in the OI Process (whether it is
on the stage of idea creating, developing or commercializing). After these
things are sorted out, the optimized tools can be implemented in the different
departments, which need to work with these tools again. To involve the
employees in this transformation process will require workshops and some time.
But as the case studies showed, it will be worth it, because in the end it will
safe costs and time and employees will be technological wise be picked up
appropriately.
Source:
Urbinati,
A., Chiaroni, D., Chiesa, V., & Frattini, F. (2020). The role of digital technologies
in open innovation processes: An exploratory multiple case study analysis.
R&D Management, 50(1), 136–160.
12 min
March 05, 2021 Open Innovation and Digitalization
EP1: Open Innovation and Digitalization
Last week, Aurelia already gave you some insight on
this series and open innovation, but today we will dig a little bit deeper into
the topic on digitalization itself and I will explain to you how digitalization
can be used to drive open innovation.
We will give you some advice on
how open innovation can help to drive the transformation.
Open Innovation: accessing external knowledge to find solutions for pressing
problems. In a business context open innovation means to use inflows and outflows of
knowledge to accelerate internal innovation. As a consequence the
organization's boundaries become permeable, what allows to combine the company
resources with the external co-operators. For example you can get access to
important knowledge though experts. Moreover, companies can
reduce costs and bring innovations to market more quickly.
How can open innovation help to
support digital transformations? The explanation is based on these four key
elements.
1. Determine
your strategy
2. Developing the organisational culture

3. Developing
the right mindset

4. Empowering
your employees

Further Links:
Open Innovation Tool: Adobe Kickbox
This episode was based on the blogpost from Tatjana Juskov; October 13th, 2020: How to Use Digital Transformation to Drive Open Innovation which was originally posted on a blog of the RMIT University in collaboration with Geoffrey Mann. Here is the link to the original publication*
*Engelsberger, A., Juskov T. and Mann, G. (2020), 'How to Use Digital Transformation to Drive Open Innovation'
7 min
February 28, 2021Employee Experience and Open Innovation
EP2: Employee Experience and Open InnovationThis episode I am talking with Dr. Tanja Reimer about employee experience in combination with open innovation and how important it is to build a healthy environment for employees. Just then one would be able to help creating an open mindset to be able to exchange knowledge across companies' borders.

Further information and links:
Dr. Tanja Reimer
Linkedin
Her book: "Service Learning - Persönlichkeitsentwicklung durch
gesellschaftliches Engagement"
31 min

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