Open Innovation

Are You Open To Innovation? "But the idea behind open innovation is that there are too many good ideas held by people who don't work for you to ignore. Even the best companies with the most extensive internal capabilities have to take external knowledge and ideas into account when they think about innovation. So good ideas can come from outside as well as inside. And they can go to market not only inside your company, but also outside, through others...Of the things that have to become a key focus, one is to be much more externally aware and externally focused before you undertake internal projects. You want to take internal projects in hand to fill a gap that's not being addressed outside or to put the pieces together in new combinations in systems or architectures that are very useful."

Interesting that Procter and Gamble will license technology to competitors and that IBM is the biggest reseller of Sun hardware. Unfortunately, he called Linux a computer language but he's still making valid points here.

Quick MBA's summary on Open Innovation "The research from PARC spawned many successful products, but the shareholders of Xerox did not benefit as much as others did. Employees who worked on promising technologies departed to form start-up companies, many of which, such as 3Com and Adobe, acheived much success. In fact, the market capitalization of Xerox's spin-offs exceeded that of Xerox itself."