This issue of CBR continues our series on innovation and the role of IT in enabling it. As many of you know, Cutter has a full-fledged Innovation & Enterprise Agility practice that focuses on helping clients to foster an environment for innovation and tap creative, valuable outcomes as well as to transform ideas into economic value. It goes without saying that the objective of this focus on innovation is to enable value creation and appropriation through the use and deployment of information systems. After the recession, as budgets have begun to allow for experimentation again, I went on record suggesting that it was up to us to seize the opportunity and ensure that we don't squander it.
While I am well aware of the importance of innovation and the pressures that are currently being put on IT shops around the world to deliver, my awareness was reinforced at the Cutter Latin America Summit 2007. I am ashamed to say that it was my first Summit (and if you have never been to one, you should also be embarrassed). Having been to a number of these types of events, and despite my obvious affiliation with Cutter, I have to say that I truly enjoyed the intimate setting and the ability to discuss pressing issues without pressure -- if that makes any sense!
I came away from the Cutter Latin America Summit with a renewed focus on innovation, and, since the team at CBR likes to put its money where its mouth is, we have been steadily producing a series of issues that get to the heart of the innovation challenge. In our last installment, in the November 2007 issue, we focused on the deep competencies -- dynamic IT capabilities and improvisational IT capabilities -- that underlie the firm's ability to foster agility in the face of changing environmental forces and competitive moves. Our aim was to decompose these high-level (and quite fuzzy) concepts in order to help you appreciate their drivers. Doing so gives you the tools to better, and more precisely, manage the development and maintenance of dynamic and improvisational IT capabilities, leading to superior agility and the ability to more reliably innovate.
Last month's CBR was all about the firm, and its focus was intraorganizational (i.e., look inside and see what you can do to foster agility and innovation). What was missing is the interorganizational view (i.e., a look at the opportunities and options for fostering innovation by linking with other organizations up and down -- or outside of -- the value network). We broaden the picture this month, by focusing on open innovation. We benchmark current practices and because of the novelty of this approach, provide a blueprint for its use by organizations around the world.
Stay tuned, because we will complete this triple play on innovation with the January 2008 issue of CBR. While not strictly about innovation, the next issue on trends for the year 2008 is certainly related. The focus in that first issue of the new year will shift from doing it (the process of innovating) to the (expected) outputs of the process in the form of upcoming products and trends in the IT landscape. Note as well that it will be our third trends issue, enabling us to begin looking at developing (and dying) multiyear trends.
As faithful readers know, in each issue of CBR, we recruit two authors: one from the world of academia and one from the world of practice. Our academic contribution typically comes from members of the global information systems research community, while our practicing contributor is typically a member of the Cutter family of experts. Our contributors shape the specifics of our benchmarking survey and then we ask you, our readers, to respond; our contributors then analyze and comment on the results.
On the topic of open innovation, we assembled a team of contributors that is at the forefront of this trend. Our academic contribution comes from Joe Feller. Joe, whom many of you will remember from our Web 2.0 issue (Vol. 7, No. 2), is Senior Lecturer of Business Information Systems at University College Cork (Ireland). Providing our view from the trenches of business is Ana Paula Valente Pereira, a founding partner at WhatEver Consulting Group, a firm that helps customers adopt an integrated set of standard IT processes, promoting innovation, agility, and discipline. Ana is also involved firsthand in open innovation as a contributor to the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), part of the Eclipse Process Framework.
Joe starts his contribution with a definition of open innovation and a series of examples that make that definition come to life. I always enjoy reading Joe's pieces because I get a lot of tips; he is definitely plugged into what's happening. Following his introduction, Joe benchmarks the state of understanding open innovation and then comments on the survey results. He dissects current practices on the importance of being open and the most common sources and modes of innovation. Joe concludes with practical -- and provocative -- guidelines.
Ana is a first-time contributor to CBR, and she offers an article that I suggest you read with attention. Her piece is packed with insightful analyses and the deep understanding of a phenomenon typical of those who are intimately involved in it. She starts her contribution by pointing out that openness is a continuum, not a binary condition. She then proposes an integrative framework that helps her analyze the survey along the lines of open-in, open-out, and open-collaboration practices. Ana focuses her analysis further by looking at open process innovation. This section will be of particular value to many of you in IT shops where most of your work is spent innovating processes rather than products. Ana closes with tangible guidelines for those of you who have yet to embrace the open innovation trend.
I have to admit that like the majority of the survey respondents, I was somewhat (vaguely) familiar with the term "open innovation" -- just enough to recruit experts on the subject. Thus, for me, this issue has been a great learning opportunity, something that I am sure will hold true for most of you as well.
