Open Innovation

Open innovation is an approach adopted by many large companies in the world today, advocating the development and co-commercialization of innovative ideas in sharing and cooperation without using closed and limited resources. Open innovation is an overarching strategy to leverage outside the company while developing new business ideas.

Henry Chesbrough, assistant professor and faculty director of the Haas School of Business Open Innovation Center, defines open innovation as:

“Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology. Open Innovation combines internal and external ideas into architectures and systems whose requirements are defined by a business model.”

The open innovation approach points out that in today's world where information can be accessed with a one click, institutions are restricted from doing their own research with their own internal resources and argues that companies should resort to methods such as purchasing or licensing when creating new products.

In addition, it advocates that the works developed by the company but which are not a part of the core business as spin-offs and made available to the general public. Companies implement open innovation practices in different ways, such as agreements between companies, with R&D labs at universities, crowdsourced competitions, and innovation ecosystems. Examples of companies that implement open innovation work are as follows:

• Lego allows community members to share their own designs and Lego paintings on its Lego Ideas website, while actually developing new products inspired by the ideas here. As an example, the mini Big Bang Theory Lego set is a community-based product originating from Lego Ideas. When the number of supporters reached 10 thousand, the Lego design was evaluated and the design was presented to the stores under the Lego Ideas product label. When product ideas are accepted into production, members who design the product and present it to the community also earn money.

• Another example is the ReWorld Open Innovation Program run by Vodafone with imece and supported by us. University or graduate students between the ages of 18-30, recent graduates and young professionals from all over Turkey could attend ReWorld, the open innovation program implemented by Vodafone in order to seek a systemic solution to the e-waste management problem.