SwampFox

Reinventing Innovation: A Summer Project

Submitted by: John Warner on Jul 31, 2006 at 10:42 am Tagged with: Featured Articles, News of the Southeastern Innovation Corridor Source:

In the 1990s, I ran a small venture capital fund called Capital Insights. When we sell our last investments, we are going to have done pretty well, but there weren't enough high-impact companies being started here ten years ago to support a venture fund. So I began trying to create an environment to spawn more of these companies. I took the year 2000 off, traveling all over the state talking to the then Governor and ex-governors, CEO and economic developers, and basically anyone else that would listen to how important it was that we develop a more innovative and productive economy.

One strong impression I came away with was that we didn't know each other or many of the good things going on in other parts of South Carolina. So I started Swamp Fox: News of the Southeastern Innovation Corridor, to spread the news of innovation and connect people together. Then I began organizing meetings to build relationships, beginning with the Carolina Crescent Coalition, which evolved into InnoVenture. At InnoVenture 2006, large anchors, like Michelin, presented how they would like to see Communities of Innovation grow up around them, and inventors and emerging companies presented to find business partners and capital.

We've made tremendous progress. This issue of Swamp Fox newsletter has been emailed to 10,000 subscribers, and 100,000 people each Monday catch the highlights on the South Carolina Business Review with Mike Switzer on South Carolina Public Radio. 650 people attend InnoVenture 2006, up from around 300 in 2004.

Within half a day's drive of Greenville, SC, there are over 15 research universities, a deep international industrial base, and 23 million people. We're are moving from organizations trying to innovate in closed silos within their four walls, to an open innovation culture were organizations are able to take advantage of the immense talent in the region.

Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, has the first key to more open innovation:

The intersection of disciplines or cultures is a vibrant place for creativity because bringing together very different concepts from very different fields sets off an explosion of ideas. Quantity of ideas leads to quality of ideas. Innovators don’t produce because they are successful; they are successful because they produce.

Ralph Hulseman from Michelin provided another key in his presentation to InnoVenture 2006. It's great to collaborate with others, but no one wants to give away trade secrets. Ralph's presentation includes a diagram that is a very useful tool in differentiating between an organization's secret sauce, which is not appropriate to discuss in an open forum like InnoVenture, and the vast majority of innovation projects critical to success where leveraging the knowledge and resources of the community outside your four walls is not only desirable, but is becoming essential, to success.

Swamp Fox and InnoVenture have been built on these notions, but something more is needed to really spark true open innovation. John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and John Hagel, alumnus of McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, provide insights into what the architecture of open innovation communities should be, which they call "creation nets." They describe this in a couple of articles, Creation Nets: Getting the Most from Open Innovation and Globalization & Innovation: Some Contrarian Perspectives
.
First they identify the business model of open innovation clearly.

• Knowledge becomes obsolete quickly during times of accelerating change, so use existing stocks of knowledge to connect rapidly and effectively with others to gain access to broader knowledge flows.
• Define modular projects specifying high-level performance requirements and give the participants a substantial degree of freedom in meeting them which will result in a greater diversity of potential solutions.
• Mobilize hundreds of individuals in the pursuit of distributed, collaborative, and cumulative innovation.

Then they identify the key architectural component that makes open innovation work.

Creation nets organize their activities into modular processes, making it easier to incorporate large numbers of participants. While creation nets are loose in one dimension — the freedom to innovate — they are remarkably tight in another: defining clear "action points" when participants must come together and deliver outputs. While members are rewarded with short-term cash or contracts for delivering successful innovations, successful communities build long-term relationships based on repeated interactions demonstrating the value of cooperation.

Several of us this summer are working through how to reengineer the architecture of Swamp Fox and InnoVenture to create a vibrant, open innovation community in the region. We'd appreciate you leaving a comment and sharing your successful experiences. Even better, contact me and I'll buy you a cup of coffee one day to discuss how we can work together.

John Warner