Nature.com and Open Innovation

InnoCentive, Inc., the global open innovation marketplace, and Nature Publishing Group (NPG), a leading scientific and medical publisher, today announced the launch of the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion. Jointly hosted on InnoCentive.com and nature.com, the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion provides a hub for scientific collaboration and open innovation.

Companies and not-for-profit organizations (known as ‘Seekers’) can post ‘Challenges’ in life sciences, physical sciences and clinical medicine on the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion. These ‘Challenges’ are briefs that allow Seekers to tap into external expertise to solve research problems or drive development of new products and technologies. Successful Solvers receive financial rewards. Seekers can call on the expertise from nature.com’s five million monthly visitors and InnoCentive’s community of more than 175,000 Solvers.

New Rules for Managing Innovation: My View

Just posted on BusinessWeek – an interesting article on four rules for managing innovation today. Interesting to know what you think of these. I will deliver the headlines with my own view below:

Silos are FINALLY falling (but not in the way you may think: Personally, I do not think silos are falling to any significant extent. I think they need to fall, and I believe that everyone generally realizes this, but silos are unfortunately alive and thriving in large corporates and medium-sized businesses.

Outside-in innovation: Well, my view is that without this you are dead-in-the-water. Why? Because outside-in innovation includes basics like listening to the customer, involving your partners in the process, taking heed of the environment. The days of everyone locked in a room “innovating” are gone.

Social Media as an Innovation Tool: Everyone is struggling with this – mainly because social media is still not alive and well in the Enterprise. But it will be. Give it time! In the meantime, organizations should look to embrace social media as much as possible, and you certainly need to become familiar with it outside the organization, and look for ways in which social media can be used TODAY to drive innovation.

War Games: Well, to me this is guerrilla marketing 101 – keeping ahead of the competition, keeping your finger on the pulse, etc etc. Nothing new here, and not a capability that I would call a “new rule” for innovation.

What do you think?