Everyone is doing it, but what is the point of open innovation?

Open Innovation is used for various reasons:

To avoid incorrect developments,

to engage customers,

to bring ideas to the outside world

to minimize development risks and shorten development cycles,

to acquire and disseminate know-how, or

for building external partnerships.

These are just a few of many reasons. Everyone may have different reasons, but every reason is a good reason to innovate. Open innovation creates an incentive and shows how important innovation is. A good culture of innovation is more important than ever. But what does it really do for you? The question is relatively easy to answer, as there are some proven benefits of open innovation.

These are the benefits of open innovation for companies

Fit-to-market:

It is also more likely that your innovation will be more innovative if several people work on it than if you work on it alone. This is because the addition of external parties opens up new perspectives and creates functional added value rather than simply developing something without asking others for their opinion, for example. At the same time, this increases acceptance on the market, as you have already involved customers during development. In this way, you also counteract undesirable developments. It is also possible to open up new markets that you did not think of before or simply could not achieve with your base and that only becomes possible by working with others.

Time-to-market:

In contrast to closed innovation, open innovation omits the classic feedback loops, as much is left directly to the outside world in the development process. Internally, you can therefore concentrate on other tasks. This reduces the time it takes to go to market.

Cost to market:

By cooperating with others, whether end customers or partners, many processes can be handed over to them, which saves costs.

A large pool of knowledge:

If you have no or no good ideas yourself, you can obtain not only ideas but also knowledge and know-how through open innovation. On the other hand, you can also share your ideas and knowledge with others. In doing so, you are doing something good and may also be able to benefit from the resulting innovation. This creates a large pool of knowledge in which you share things and develop things together. In other words, create a win-win situation together. The key word is common.