“Open Innovation” Cafe
Author: Jessica Hobson
We recently held our second Innovation Cafe at CCH. Once every six weeks we conduct a coffee, croissants and creativity session in the CCH Australia office in Sydney. All staff are invited and those who are interested come along to participate in a creativity-boosting workshop or to hear an external speaker. Last week we invited along Dr Jeffrey Tobias, the Managing Director of The Strategy Group, to talk to us about Open Innovation. Dr Tobias has extensive experience in innovation, including being global lead for innovation in the Innovations team in the Internet Business Solutions Group in Cisco Systems.
Using examples from a range of companies and industries – including Cisco, Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi – Dr Tobias explained that Open Innovation involved creating an innovation ecosystem that extends beyond the four walls of your office to include customers, suppliers and partners. Effective innovation doesn’t mean that you have an isolated R&D or engineering team coming up with new ideas in perfect isolation. Instead, companies need to engage with all internal and external stakeholders to maximise idea generation and execution.
After hearing about Open Innovation, we then spent some time with Dr Tobias discussing how we could use Open Innovation concepts to improve innovation at CCH. Our program had already started opening up innovation to all staff at CCH but could we do more to include suppliers and customers? What would be an effective way to do this? Dr Tobias gave us plenty of food for thought and it was a very worthwhile morning.
And as luck would have it, two days later we met with representatives of Lonely Planet, the travel publisher, who it turned out were implementing their own Open Innovation model. We had a great discussion with them about the challenges both our companies face in today’s dynamic publishing market, and talked about ideas and strategies for maximising our respective opportunities.
Next step: engage in Open Innovation with our customers. We have plenty of ideas of how we can do this so I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Tags: Innovation Cafe; Open Innovation;
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