What’s the key to creating a culture that drives innovation? Which approaches should companies use more?
For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls–from suppliers, independent inventors, and university labs. Executives in a number of companies are now considering the next step in this trend toward more open innovation. So write authors Bughin, Chui and Johnson in The McKinsey Quarterly (June 2008), which I cite and quote at length in the current issue of Growth Strategies: Increasing numbers of organizations are now approaching innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties, or distributed co-creation, to use its technical name. LEGO, for instance, famously invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then financially rewarded the people whose ideas proved marketable. The shirt retailer Threadless sells merchandise online–and now in a physical store, in Chicago–that is designed interactively with the company’s customer base. In the software sector, open-source platforms developed through distributed co-creation have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations. What facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the Web as a participatory platform…. Even the most advanced businesses are just taking the first few steps on a long path toward distributed co-creation, conclude the authors. Companies should experiment with this new approach to learn both how to use it successfully and more about its long-term significance. http://www.retailwire.com/Discussions/Sngl_Discussion.cfm/13102
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