From Closed Innovation to Open Innovation: IRIS Helsingor Denmark

How to increase customer involvement through mass customization and customer co-design? That was the question we (Marko Mäkipää, Maria Mäntymäki and I) asked in our 29th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia Helsingor paper. A draft is available: Download IRIS29_final_Makipaa_Ahonen_Mantymaki.pdf and the final paper will be available in the conference proceedings. Like described in the picture below, we were seeking a transition path from closed innovation to open innovation.

We found that when seeking to increase customer loyalty and attracting new customers, companies need to increase customer involvement in research and design (R&D) operation. This itself radically changes the innovation process and how ideas and customer communication are handled.

Brokering and social networking processes are therefore described in this open innovation context. The technology brokering process model by Hargadon and Sutton (1997) is used to describe open innovation. Or more like: how to search for new ideas and how to store them for further use. Certain business cases are introduced where the customers have a radically different role. The use and role of information systems in these processes are discussed. It would be great to receive feedback about this IRIS paper of ours.

Afterword: Marko Mäkipää has just received an acceptance of  a Tekes project on mass customization, Maria Mäntymäki has a new job in the Center for Open Source Software (COSS) and I reported in my earlier post about a new open innovation research project. Some co-incidences ;-)

P.S. If you are interested in the connections of open innovation and co-design, please, ask for the older article by Pekka Ketola (Nokia Multimedia) and myself. Includes a Chinese mobile phone design case! Made for the 12th Product Development Management Conference, Copenhagen.

Comments

[Anil Rathi]

Hi Mikko,

I am enjoying reading your blog and would like to request for the older article about open innovation and co-design that you co-authored. This is of great interest to me as our company Idea Crossing runs idea competitions for customers and partners.

I completely agree about your point above about the involvement of customers in the innovation process. We've been running open innovation competitions for 4 years and have worked with Hilton Hotels to tap into future business travellers for new ideas. The results have been amazing! When customers are given the opportunity to create new concepts on brands that they are passionate about, the ideas can offer a fresh perspective to management. We have developed a system methodology for creating exciting idea competitions. We believe idea competitions provide structure and motivation for participants in the process.

Visit our flagship competition called the Innovation Challenge www.innovationchallenge.com which involved 321 teams of graduate students from 83 universities in 18 countries last year. This year Hilton and Daimler Chrysler are marquee sponsors posing challenge questions on pressing business issues to our network of the most innovative minds worldwide.

Looking forward to speaking with you soon.

Anil

Founder & President, Idea Crossing
Founder, Innovation Challenge
rathi@ideacrossing.com

[Mikko Ahonen]

Thanks for comments, Anil.

The Innovation Challenge website you introduced is fascinating. The challenge is so intriguing that I really would like to collect a team and participate (if I had time and if I did not need to be the team leader ;-)

Your concept and information system behind the actual competition caught my attention. I welcome your system's ability to accomodate real-time information flow and content management. Traditionally, one of the biggest challenges in suggestion management systems is to provide individual-level feedback during the process AND support intrinsic motivation of participants. There is an excellent article by James Fairbank, William Sprangler and Scott Williams (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/tbit/2003/00000022/00000005).

In the discussion part of the attached article of ours (Marko Mäkipää, Mikko Ahonen and Maria Mäntymäki) we wrote:

"The Web 2.0 technologies and peer-to-peer networking may radically change those information systems used between R&D and customers. Users have gained new possibilities to create content in online communities since RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format is becoming de facto in blog feeds and in notification messages. .... Mass customization may in the future mean aggregating and selecting data from customer’s blogs and wikis.".

Let's see what kind of innovation management aggregators will emerge. Will they help in sustaining the ideation process? Which part of this ideation takes place in public (internet) and which part will remain private (intranet / personal work spaces)? For a company, it would be great to have (lead) users innovating for years, not just for randomly ;-)

[Mikko Ahonen]

An update:

Maria Mäntymäki got married (congratulations :-) and her new name is Maria Antikainen. Maria represents now the Technical University of Tampere and works in an exciting project called OSSI (Managing OSS as an Integrated Part of Business). See: http://ossi.coss.fi/ossi/

By the way, with the director Petri Räsänen of COSS we just (24th August) had an interesting discussion about open source and innovation. We were both inspired by Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University, http://home.case.edu/~kjl13/research.htm#research5 ), how IT-Innovation in a company enables new product and process innovations.

So, let's see what kind of role open source software plays in enabling organisations to innovate. Eric von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation (http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm ) has some truly interesting findings about this area. I should have read this book b-e-f-o-r-e writing my part of the above mentioned article ;-) Well, with Maria and Marko we are planning the next (better) one.