Everyone is doing it, but what is the point of Open Innovation?

Open innovation is used for different reasons:

To avoid undesirable developments,

to engage customers,

to get ideas out there,

to minimise development risks and shorten development cycles,

for know-how acquisition and dissemination or

for the development of external partnerships.

These are just a few reasons out of many. Everyone may have different reasons, but every reason is a good reason to innovate. Open Innovation incentivises and demonstrates the importance of innovation. A good innovation culture is more important than ever. But what does it really do for you? The question is relatively easy to answer, as there are some proven benefits to doing Open Innovation.

These are the advantages of Open Innovation for companies

Fit-to-Market:

Furthermore, it is more likely that your innovation will be more innovative if several people work on it than if you work on it alone. This is because the inclusion of external people opens up new perspectives and a functional added value can emerge sooner than, for example, if you simply develop something further without asking others for their opinion. At the same time, acceptance on the market increases because you have already included the customers in the development. In this way, you also counteract undesirable developments. In addition, it is also possible to open up new markets that you had not thought of before or that you simply could not reach with your base and that only become possible through cooperation with others.

Time-to-market:

In contrast to Closed Innovation, Open Innovation does away with the classic feedback loops, as much of the development process is left directly to the outside world. Internally, you can concentrate on other tasks. This shortens the time it takes to go to market.

Cost-to-Market:

By cooperating with others, whether end customers or partners, many processes can be handed over to them, thus saving costs.

A large pool of knowledge:

If you don't have any good ideas yourself, you can use Open Innovation to get knowledge and know-how as well as ideas. On the other hand, you can also pass on your ideas and knowledge to others. In this way, you do something good and can perhaps also profit from the resulting innovation. This creates a large pool of knowledge in which you share things and develop things together. In other words, creating a win-win situation together. Together is the keyword.