Open Innovation: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA

Part 5 BEST PRACTICES AND ADVICE FOR OPEN INNOVATION

This part contains three chapters, all of which focus on a bit of the broader picture of managing Open Innovation.

• Chapter 10 by Donna Rainone, Mike Rainone, and Louise Musial is a thought piece on the reasons larger firms may want to work with smaller firms to enhance their innovation muscles. All three authors are executives at a small firm who have worked with numerous larger firms in innovation collaborations. They present the lessons they have learned from these successful Open Innovation (OI) collaborations. Based on decades of product development support their firm has provided to numerous large enterprises, the authors describe what characteristics are desirable in an OI partner and then best practices when working with small firms, including a timeline for going from initial engagement with an OI partner until the completion of first set of tasks.
• Gerhard Drexler, Andrej Duh, Andreas Kornherr, and Dean Korosak prescribe what senior managers and executives should demand to see periodically so that they stay on top of their game in managing the firm's OI practices in Chapter 11. This is especially important considering the emergence of Big Data in the last few years. The authors argue that firms react in two ways to garner the right information from Big Data. The first is to have a data scientist who constantly looks over the huge amount of data firms now gather on a continuous basis. The second is to have a structured ...