L’Open Innovationtranslates a philosophy and different practices of collaborative innovation. This approach immediately appears attractive: openness vs. closure, flexible approaches vs. a linear model perceived as rigid, an element of agility vs. the feeling of heaviness of classic models of innovation.
However, the benefits of openness with co-developers – whether professionals or consumers/users – can quickly be undermined by aphenomenon of endogamy.
Open innovation can become endogamous: if it is not carefully scripted, open innovation can lead each of the actors to gradually evolve towards a new closed organization. The initial perimeter “opened” to external components (designers, experts, users) but in certain cases quickly transmitted its own referents to them, so that the new community created ends up functioning as a new closed perimeter. The real benefits of openness are then only transitory.
When I write “their own references», I am not thinking of the working methods (which benefit from being shared by everyone), but of the angle with which everyone views the subject to be treated. Because the benefit of open innovation - it is of course the integration of new technical skills on a project - but it is also the integration of another complementary vision of the subject which allows us to give more perspective and ultimately to obtain an organization which challenges itself. If for reasons of cohesion or conformism, this culture of challenge fades – which can happen unintentionally in large organizations that practice open innovation – the new scope operates with endogamy such that its vision of the subject ends up being unique. And the problem is then to know if this unique thought is still connected to the real issues of the market. For example, it is common to observe that during a project, a lay “user” who is associated with a co-creation approach in order to benefit from his fresh and realistic vision of consumer issues, ends up quite quickly adopting the angle, the vocabulary and the logic of thought of the professionals with whom he works. There is then almost a risk of returning to square one.
We have developed atInsightquest,different scenarios to deal with this phenomenon of endogamous open innovation. We are not changing the general logic of this open innovation but are adopting with our customers a series of concrete initiatives aimed at limiting such risks as much as possible. Our approaches essentially aim to restore the breathing spaces necessary for co-design in order to benefit in a more sustainable way from the benefits of this open-innovation and to maintain the virtuous circle of an organization that builds positively in self-challenge.
