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The Berkeley Innovation Forum

Just attended two excellent days in Berkeley at Henry Chesbrough’s Berkeley Innovation Forum. This is a small group who get together twice a year to share leading edge thinking around innovation – especially Open Innovation.

Some key take aways for me from the forum are:

- the challenges across organisations driving innovation within their organisations are similar. Each organisation is struggling with issues such as true connectivity and openness, funding, growth from within, culture change, outside in and inside out.

- many organisations feel it essential to set up separate “innovation labs” that are funded and managed separately. I heard speakers from Intel, and chatted to similar managers from Cisco, Fujitsu and Siemens. It’s an interesting issue….if innovations are truly disruptive, then who owns them? Business units with particular charters will not – its not in their brief. Hence the need for separate labs. On the other hand, one of the key enablers of Open Innovation is breaking down the barriers, and not setting up close “labs” disconnected from the customers. So what do we do?

- there is a strong desire for disruptive innovation over incremental innovation, and often the processes put in place to encourage innovation in companies only delivers the incremental gains. Organisations continue to struggle with achieving disruptive innovation outcomes.

What was interesting to me was the omission of several topics of discussion by the speakers and the attendees that I would have thought would be paramount in the implementation of Open Innovation. These include the use of technology to implement Open Innovation (its all about connectedness), rewards and recognition, IP issues (mentioned briefly), and culture and leadership. Either these topics are now taken for granted, or they still need bring to the fore.

There is little doubt that Open Innovation continues to be grow in popularity and usage. It is definitely at the leading edge of innovation thinking. However, I feel that today leaders and practitioners understand the “what” but are still struggling with the “how”.