Module 7 - Open & Outsourced Innovation

"Open Innovation" has been the rage since 2004. A great number of books were published on the subject in the late 1990s and early 2000s that fueled a critical mass of demand from industrial and high tech organizations. Basically, Open Innovation is any development approach that is not exclusively 100% internal. When the majority of development is internal and a small amount occurs outside, or there is a high external supplier content in cost of goods sold, we often call it "Outsourcing." At the same time, Outsourcing can refer to 100% external development. At the moment, people are writing about these two subjects as if they were separate. In the next decade, they will become almost synonymous.

To start, a number of brief "book reviews" will be presented that get at the range and span of the subject matter so as to identify the population of alternatives and opportunities that are Open and Outsourced Innovation. Due to the somewhat soft nature of this subject matter, a handful of books together corral the broad nature of this topic. Attendees at prior Innovation Summits have found these book reviews useful to flesh out their own thinking and to suggest references for their employees to read to get on the same page with them.

We will then attempt to cull down the infinite number of permutations of Outsourcing and/or Open Innovation into a finite set of activities that can be managed and discussed as "stand alone" subjects. For example, "alliances for co-development" versus "in-licensing or out-licensing" of a technology are separable subjects. Having covered innovation vs. invention vs. intellectual property in the first two days of the Summit, participants will be ready for this discussion as all three parts of the continuum come into play differently depending on the type of Open/Outsourced activity.