Part 5
BEST PRACTICES AND ADVICE FOR OPEN INNOVATION

This part contains three chapters, all of which focus on a bit of the broader picture of managing Open Innovation.

• Chapter 10 by Donna Rainone, Mike Rainone, and Louise Musial is a thought piece on the reasons larger firms may want to work with smaller firms to enhance their innovation muscles. All three authors are executives at a small firm who have worked with numerous larger firms in innovation collaborations. They present the lessons they have learned from these successful Open Innovation (OI) collaborations. Based on decades of product development support their firm has provided to numerous large enterprises, the authors describe what characteristics are desirable in an OI partner and then best practices when working with small firms, including a timeline for going from initial engagement with an OI partner until the completion of first set of tasks.
• Gerhard Drexler, Andrej Duh, Andreas Kornherr, and Dean Korosak prescribe what senior managers and executives should demand to see periodically so that they stay on top of their game in managing the firm's OI practices in Chapter 11. This is especially important considering the emergence of Big Data in the last few years. The authors argue that firms react in two ways to garner the right information from Big Data. The first is to have a data scientist who constantly looks over the huge amount of data firms now gather on a continuous basis. The second is to have a structured way of having these data presented to managers to get a quick snapshot of the current situation. They call this your “daily cup of information,” a sheet that you can carefully look into every morning while sipping your coffee before you start your work day. The authors argue that this cup of collective intelligence, gleaned through the analysis of Big Data, should have an update on specific components related to your business, namely, technology, trends, customers, markets, gap analysis, and competitors.
• Finally, Christopher Miller, Anne Orban, and their colleagues Becky Partida, Andrea Stroud, and Paige Mowbray present the results of the American Productivity and Quality Center's 2013 best practices study for utilizing OI to generate ideas. They define 11 specific best practices associated with the Open Innovation strategies, roles, processes, measurement, and improvement. For each best practice, they provide concrete examples from best practice firms. The chapter closes with five key enablers that firms trying to improve OI performance also need to implement. All chapters indicate pitfalls to avoid and keys to successful partnering.