Hey back from my vacation to the heartland of America.  Nothing like a 1900 mile road-trip with gas @ $4.00/gallon.  It was a great time to reflect on the business of open innovation while staring at a few hundred thousand acres of corn from the Interstate.  I am still working my way through Game Changers by A.G. and Ram - some very good stuff - meaty;  spoiler alert…it will take the will of the entire firm to make your firm anywhere close to what they’ve done.  Good news is you can and, well, you’ll have to eventually…

I also read some great work from McKinsey here, Forrester (we were interviewed for this one) here and a recent one from Deloitte and Beeline Labs here.

On the tail end of the trip I had to leave and get back to work (start-up and all) and I have to say it was the best business trip over my tenure at Fluid Innovation.  Not because of some blockbuster order or new client signed (those are quite spectacular as well), but rather because one of our existing clients is: a) fascinated with the precepts of open innovation, b)actually doing something about, c) clearly sees how it will help them in nearly every facet of their business but will have an immediate economic impact.

The news is they are willing to do things “right”.  This isn’t going to be a one and done effort to retool the corporation with a bunch of internal portal content, buzzwords from management, HR policy and a huge technology investment for some unnecessary consulting and software that will “change their world”.   No huge co-creation labs and open solicitations for new, cool ideas to run their business. 

Their “wild” request was can we use our tools and marketplace internally so we can be certain that new innovations that we create in one division can be advertised, marketed and sold (think internal dollars here) to another division. Much of what they do doesn’t regularly see the light of day because of their client list, but between their clients there is very good reason to share.  They know they have tons of cross over in reinventing the same solutions or pieces of what could become a blockbuster solution if bundled together. Then for those thing discovered for external commercialization they will simply hook up directly with the Fluid marketplace.  Finally, they thought if this works for us we need to share it with our customers as well so they don’t go through the same wasteful remaking of the same innovations simply due to lack of insight.  Classic right hand/left hand metaphor.

So Tom did the endless hours of corn gazing fry your mind into popcorn?  Nope.  Where’s the innovation in all of that? I was just reenergized to see a very large corporation be willing to get on board with a relatively new idea, see the long term potential, but not rush past the obvious innovation right under their noses.  I’ll bet they become one of Open Innovation’s next generation case studies for doing it well, if not, doing it “right”.  I’ll share more as we journey down the Open road together.

Tom