New perspective on innovation

I had the pleasure of moderating an event in Dallas this morning where Dr. Henry Chesbrough was the featured speaker. Henry was at one point a tech industry exec, taught at Harvard, and now teaches and writes at UC Berkeley. He started and runs the Center for Open Innovation, out of the Haas School, and teaches a course on "management of technology" that brings together the oil-and-water combination of MBA candidates and engineering grad students.

Henry's first book, Open Innovation, made the claim that many organizations can innovate best when they open themselves to outside influences, as well as spinning internal development efforts out into the world. That cycling of perspectives and initiatives can breath fresh life into an organization's efforts to innovate in a competitive world.

I've done a number of consulting projects with clients around the subject of innovation, with organizations like Nokia and the London Business School's Global Business Consortium, and the biggest challenge is that innovation is, well, squishy. Innovation is invariably in the eye of the beholder: Some think it's developing breakout products or services; others think it's simply amped-up R&D. It's not too hard to find examples of innovative companies that most people can agree on, but it's devilishly difficult to figure out how the practices that made them successful can be ported into large, mature companies with calcified business processes.

However, on the plane home, I was able to skim through a pre-publication issue of Henry's new book, Open Business Models, which provides a range of case studies exploring the specific ways in which a variety of companies has made money from their innovation efforts. In the book, Henry maintains that there are numerous ways to create business value from innovative efforts. It's not a cookbook; innovation's a little complex for that. But Henry does offer some important insights into the steps that companies can take to create a better environment for leveraging innovative practices. Worth checking out.

gB