Recession Strategies Part 3 -- Open Innovation

"Bringing the InnoCentive marketplace to our communities marks a new era in how SAP, customers, partners and the community at large can come together to innovate and solve real business challenges."

--Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP

Not every company gets to put its own section on the SAP website, like my client InnoCentive just did. As the writer, my job was to sell a brand new model of interaction involving SAP, its customers and its community of independent developers. The model is open innovation and InnoCentive is widely acknowledged as the open innovation leader.

I had just written the company’s corporate brochure that presents the whole concept of open innovation across industries and InnoCentive’s role in it.

The challenge this time was more focused — to answer the questions: What is open innovation and why should members of SAP’s own innovation ecosystem care? That ecosystem is both complex and immense, populated by SAP AG itself, its enterprise customers, and legions of independent SAP consultants ranging from individual contributors to multi-billion dollar companies. If those questions are not answered effectively, this relationship could get very confusing very fast. Not good for a partnership with such high visibility.

For tech companies looking for their own “answers” in tough times, open innovation offers great lessons in how to make things happen anyway. Like this lesson: Open the door and invite outsiders in. Closed systems don’t have all the answers. The best answers often come from those you might not even think to ask.