Innovating Series Episode 13

Open innovation, a concept coined by Henry Chesbrough in an MIT Sloan Management Review article 20 years ago, involves tapping into external sources — such as customers, startups, crowdsourcing platforms, and universities — to generate ideas for new products and services, or what he called distributed innovation process.

In a recent article, Henry Chesbrough himself evaluates the evolution of the concept. How has it fared after two decades? While some companies have achieved great results with this approach and learned from the challenges of others, one unexpected finding is that the main obstacles to effective open innovation are internal, not external, to the organization.

Open innovation has proved successful, only if companies are capable of getting beyond internal silos management behaviour.