Recombinant open innovation
Last week I attended the Kimconference where Henry Chesbrough was keynote speaker. He explained to the Catalan audience how Open Innovation could help companies (large and small) to become more competitive. It occurred to me, that up to now most people view the Open Innovation concept as something mainly related to developing new products, new services, new technologies. We under-estimate the potential of just combining existing elements of various businesses into a new value chain. As a simple example, taking an existing product from company A, and sell it through the existing sales channels of company B. Is that new? Hardly, but who cares? If we want Open Innovation to contribute to this year’s bottom line, then we’d better stop talking about joint product development (which will only hurt our short term bottom line) and start talking about making the most of the building blocks for business we have in place TODAY. We could call that: recombinant innovation.
Recombinant open innovation treats existing businesses as networks of building blocks (products, technologies, marketing campaigns, distribution channels, retail agreements, bundling agreements, legal frameworks, import /export arrangements, price structures) that are combined in a certain way. In order to create more business, you take the building blocks from various businesses of various companies and try to connect them into a new or extended network that creates more value than the existing networks combined. We are finding in our consultancy practice an increased interest in this kind of open innovation, because it is one of the few open innovation approaches that can be ‘sold’ to top management in times of crisis, markets shrinking and margins disappearing.
hablar