The internal challenge of open innovation
I tweeted the other day that "ironically the biggest challenge of open innovation seems to be internal". This tweet was prompted by several conversations with people within large organisations with a responsibility for open innovation.
In talking to them it was clear that they spend most of their time trying to persuade, cajole, tempt or force their colleagues/managers to partner with external people or organisations, despite it being part of the organisational strategy there remain powerful structures or forces, both formal and informal, to prevent this happening.
My colleague David Simoes-Brown likes to say that open innovation professionals are on the 'fringe of the fringe' of their organisations. By this he means that innovation teams, if they exist, tend to be fringe departments as they are about disrupting or evolving the status quo, and open innovators are on the fringe of the innovation departments. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, but cements the challenge of building credibility within, before or in parallel with building credibility outside.
The open innovation professionals whom i've worked with who are most successful work just as hard, if not even harder, to network within their organisations to find the right people to be able to make a deal happen once they've sourced one externally. And tools like twitter are, in part, so exciting to me because they form a wonderful shortcut into organisations bypassing existing channels or opening up entirely new channels of communication that didn't exist previously.
As ever i'd be interested in other peoples experiences or views of the internal barriers to open innovation.
