Surely you have heard the term "open innovation" on different occasions when we talk about the need to innovate to develop new super wow solutions in your company or organization and keep it competitive. 

But... what is open innovation? Here we will tell you about it...

Open innovation refers to the practice of using both external and internal ideas to better advance the innovation processes of the organization. This is not limited only to the use of external ideas and technologies, but also to other types of external resources such as facilities, equipment, skills, specialized knowledge, among others.

The main rationale behind the need for open innovation is that no organization can have all the necessary resources or generate all the necessary ideas to maintain its competitiveness in the complex world in which we live today. Especially nowadays that our products and services must have a totally sustainable approach, we know that the projects to develop these sustainable products and services have to be multidisciplinary and, therefore, we need to collaborate with other actors. 

Here are some famous examples of successful open innovation…

• Procter & Gamble's Connect + Develop program encourages outside innovation and has spawned super-popular products like Febreze and the Swiffer dusters. 

• The Solve platform of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) constantly publishes technological, environmental and/or social challenges originating from global problems. The Mexican startup Xilinat, which manufactures the sustainable sugar substitute made from agricultural waste, and the business model of the Chilean startup Algramo to reduce the use of plastic packaging, participated in these challenges and obtained resources.

• On the LEGO Ideas platform, fans can propose their own ideas for new sets and the community votes to determine which ones will become reality. Very famous sets such as the Yellow Submarine by The Beatles have come from here.

• Netflix held a contest to award a million dollars to the team that managed to improve the effectiveness of its recommendation algorithm by more than 10%. Many of the improvements received were used and the algorithm improved considerably.

• Linux, one of the most used operating systems in the world, is an open-source software that was created with the collaboration of thousands of developers from all over the world.

As we saw in the examples, open innovation may have many faces, for example: collaborative research projects, strategic alliances for the development of products or services, open software development, hackathons to generate initial ideas for a new problem, contests to encourage the development of disruptive solutions, and even crowdsourcing so that the needs and feedback of the very future clients who provide the financing for the project are considered.

Are you interested in learning more about the possibilities that open innovation opens up for us? We invite you to read the second part of this blog soon.

Are you interested in participating in Rotoplas open innovation activities or programs? Would you like us to help you implement a project or initiative in which you think you will need open innovation? We invite you to contact the innwai team, the Open Innovation Hub by Rotoplas!