The Market for Open Innovation – OIA Study 2013: Key Results

When dealing with Open Innovation (OI), organizations are tasked with creating an internal ecosystem that enables profiting from external input, efficiently and effectively. Professional assistance is offered by intermediaries, consultancies, and agencies that help their clients accelerate an open innovation project by providing dedicated tools, methods, and more. These agencies are referred to as Open Innovation Accelerators (OIA).

A 2013 study of OIA, performed by Kathleen Diener & Frank Piller, School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, shows fascinating and eye-opening results that I think you may find interesting. For the full picture, refer to The Market for Open Innovation: The 2013 RWTH Open Innovation Accelerator Survey. By Kathleen Diener & Frank Piller, 2nd edition, May 2013. Lulu Publishing: Raleigh, USA (available via http://www.study.open-innovation.com).  The study reached out to 160 providers of (inbound) open innovation services to participate in a 90 minute survey investigating the OIA’s business model, environment, productivity, services, project specifics, and characteristics of their participant pool. It also asked about estimates for the development of the open innovation market. Of the 160 OIAs, 59 provided a complete data set. Secondary data sources were used for the remaining OIAs. 

 

Key Findings

• The market for open innovation is maturing
• Ideation contests are seen as the most promising open innovation format
• OIAs increasingly reach out to functions beyond new product development
• Approximately 20% of the 2010 OIAs do not exist in 2013, due to closures, acquisitions, and mergers
• The average cost for an OI project with an OIA is €43,000.
• Selecting the right OIA depends on the expected outcome and the preferred degree of outsourcing the OI function to the OIA
• From a client perspective, software plays an essential part of any open innovation venture and OIAs build on community involvement

You can find out more at http://www.study.open-innovation.com.

What is Product Innovation?

Product innovation can be defined as the creation of new or improved goods or services and their introduction to the marketplace. For more information about the definition of product innovation, click product innovation. After numerous requests to define what product innovation means to me, I have attempted to highlight the main aspects of the definition in this post.

For the more graphic-oriented people, the following illustration captures the essence of what product innovation is about for me:

An idea, even a very very good and new idea is almost always not enough. The most common mistake made by brilliant people with brilliant ideas has to do with realization of an idea into a product or service – without which, no products are born… An essential part of product innovation is creation. Not only of a new idea from a bunch of neurons pulsing around in your brain, but also of a tangible or useable object from that idea. This is the hardest and most innovation-demanding element of product innovation and it is also, unfortunately, the graveyard of most ideas. After creating an idea and a product or service, the next aspect is one where often the more stubborn and unrelenting of people tend to succeed more than others and that’s bringing the product to market. If a product isn’t marketed well, it dies. Plain and simple. If a product is marketed well, even if the product isn’t necessarily the best product in the marketplace, it breathes, kicks, and thrives, and product innovation lives on.