Why Open Innovation Is Creating a “Golden Age” for Product Creators
To the uninitiated, the idea of creating and licensing products to big companies sounds a bit far-fetched. After all, why would a big company care about YOUR idea?
Stephen Key points out in One Simple Idea that the last two decades has brought with it the emergence of what’s called “open innovation.” He describes it like this:
The reason I can do this — and the reason you and anyone else can too — is because of a trend called “open innovation” that is reshaping the business world. In the past, most new product and service ideas came from inside a company or from a big design firm. Rarely would these big corporations even consider ideas from an “outsider” like me — a regular guy with no credentials in engineering, marketing, or design, but with a creative bent and a penchant for dreaming up cool stuff. Now for the first time in history, companies are realizing that maybe, just maybe, they don’t have all the world’s smartest and most creative people working in their companies. They have finally grasped that they can, and must, find new and innovative ideas from the outside.
Another driving force behind “open innovation” is the acceleration of market change and progress.
The business world now moves faster than it ever has before. Big companies, if they are to succeed, can’t sit around waiting for innovation to come from within the company. They have to take the best ideas from wherever they can get them.
Key tells the story of how P&G came to embrace open innovation…
Nine years ago, P&G set a goal of outsourcing at least half of their new products from the outside. A few years later, they reached that goal. In 2009, more than 100 of the new products that P&G released came from outside ideas. As Jeff Weedman, a P&G vice president involved with the company’s open-innovation strategy, has said: “We don’t care where good ideas come from as long as they come to us.”
This is one reason I’m excited by the idea of creating and licensing products.
An article written by Josh Dean was featured in the Feb 2010 issue of Inc. magazine. The title of the article was “Saul’s House of Cool Ideas.”
Dean interviewed San Francisco inventor Saul Griffith about his life and his business, Other Lab. Griffith is a modern day inventor. He and his partners spend their days dreaming up ways to improve on products and create those improvements.
Griffith spent two and a half years working on ways to generate utility-scale energy. From this one endeavor six different companies were spawned.
Dean observes: “For a number of reasons, we are in a golden age for inventors, one in which anyone with a great idea can share it with the world.”
Click here for my complete review of One Simple Idea by Stephen Key. Who knows? Maybe creating products and licensing them will be a perfect fit for you.
-Ryan M. Healy
