Open Innovation stands for an open innovation process. Instead of innovating internally within the company or organization, external stakeholders from the innovation ecosystem and beyond are involved. Stakeholders include, for example, customers, research institutes or even competitors facing similar challenges. In addition to open collaboration, two other important aspects belong to open innovation: open source and crowdsourcing. The basic ideas behind both concepts are to share results, development statuses and also problems with the general public.
The process of open innovation becomes visible when organizations share problems within the framework of so-called crowdsourcing and call for joint generation of product innovations or solution concepts. This makes it possible to think outside the box. Targeted innovation is made possible by combining internal and external competencies. Ideally, this leads to solutions that would never have been thought of by the organization itself. The intermediate results are shared openly in the form of open source. Open source can be more than just software. Open source knowledge, open source architectures or open source business models are also possible.
In the recent past, more and more communities have emerged that are oriented towards open innovation. For example, the Blockchain Europe project invited an Open Innovation process. Numerous stakeholders from the field of customs are joining forces to jointly shape the future of customs processing with Blockchain. This will also address the question of how to jointly master Brexit. To this end, the project provides an open source system for connecting digital customs documents to the Blockchain.
TheSilicon Economy Logistics Ecosystems project shares the results of its development projects with the public and involves external stakeholders in an ideationprocess to jointly realize the platform economy of the future. The motto is: Together instead of alone. In this way, the future is shaped cooperatively and every stakeholder group can benefit from the developments.