CHESBROUGH H. – GARMAN A.R., How open innovation can help you cope in lean times. Harvard Business Review, December 2009

Abstract

History shows that the companies that continue to invest in their innovative capabilities during tough economic times are those that fare best when growth returns. That’s how the U.S. chemicals industry overtook Britain’s after World War I, how Sears surpassed Montgomery Ward as the leading U.S. retailer after World War II, and how Japanese semiconductor makers outpaced U.S. companies after the downturn of the early 1980s.

In a challenging business climate, focus is crucial. But companies face a real dilemma: how to maintain that focus and manage costs tightly while keeping growth options alive for the future. Deferring or canceling less promising initiatives that might have been pursued in good times allows a business to survive and eventually thrive again. Many companies give attention and resources only to the projects that are most likely to generate near-term profits, and they end up deciding quickly which initiatives fit best with the company’s core business. It’s a smart short-term strategy.

The downside of rigorous prioritization, however, is that it halts many potentially promising projects at an early point in their development and leaves them stranded inside the company. Over time, so many projects get abandoned that the company’s ability to grow beyond its core business is threatened. If focus is maintained for too long or with too much rigidity, it can become the enemy of growth. When the market recovers, the company lacks a foundation from which to rebound.

Open innovation can play an important part in the solution. By breaking down traditional corporate boundaries, open innovation allows intellectual property, ideas, and people to flow freely both into and out of an organization. To date, much more attention has been paid to the inbound flow, which we call outside-in open innovation—outsiders’ contributions that enable an enterprise to create offerings whose scale belies its internal capabilities (see “A Better Way to Innovate,” HBR July 2003).

However, in lean economic times, it is the often overlooked “inside-out” aspect of open innovation that can best serve a company. Inside-out open innovation refers to processes whereby a business places some of its assets or projects outside its own walls. That not only saves much of the time and money being invested in those projects, but also can nurture new supplier and partner relationships, promote innovative ecosystems, and generate high-margin licensing income (see the exhibit “The Inside-Out Process”). Leggi l’articolo completo