While this is an audacious act of self promotion, I still want to guide you to a nice interview I did with SAP Info, the global customer magazine of Software Company SAP. The topic was the U.S. company Innocentive that specializes in Open Innovation. Karim Lakhani, who worked as a Ph.D. researcher in the same group at MIT that I am visiting, got some fascinating performance data on Innocentive, on which I comment in this interview.
The interview answers questions like:
From Open Innovation, it is only a small step to companies developing products with the help of their own customers. Does this mean that manufacturers and customers are once again communicating directly with each other about the products, like in the good old days of the corner shop? Is it possible to prevent submitted entries, even those that haven't won, from being used commercially, patented as someone's own idea or sold on?Isn't it still more lucrative for someone with good ideas to secure themselves a patent rather than accepting a comparatively small amount of money anonymously from Innocentive?
Does Innocentive have a monopoly at the moment or are other companies already copying its business idea?
How could external and internal innovation specialists usefully share out the work in future?
Open Innovation has been called the "Ebay of ideas". Do you see a danger of people's gift for invention being sold off cheap?
Read the answers and the full interview in English here (the translation from German is not always very good). There is also a version in German language.
Comments