This is Brenda Hough, blogging my final session for day one of NetSquared. The topic is Open Innovation in Civil Society. The presenter, Cesar Castro, is the Research Director for the Institute for the Future.

About the Institute for the Future

Started as spin-off from the Rand Foundation

Health horizons group looks at the future of health. The technology horizons group looks at future trends with technology. And the ten-year forecast group looks at broad business and economic trends.

Methodologies used:

• Mapping
• Ethnographic techniques
• Expert workshops and interviews
• Scenario development and analysis
• Surveys and quantitative analysis
• Content facilitation
• Protyping/artifacts

Open Innovation

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.” -Henry Chesbrough

It's about making the organization more transparent to external world and to internal organization members, too.

Open Health as an example of open innovation.

Need to go from vertical to horizontal structures -- ideas come from everywhere. Solution seekers, not problem solvers. Work as group experiment (anti-Nobel prize).

Competition to cooperation -- breaking the silos. Post-disciplinary practice and research. Working off the intersections. IBM and Toyota cooperative strategies.

Open Business Models and Open Health Platforms -- IBM's open source strategy and Mayo Clinic's Innovation lab (SPARC) -- also the Institute for OneWorld Health (in San Francisco). yet2.com. your encore. ninesigma. innocentive.

Why is open innovation important? Lower innovation costs! bring new ideas to old problems. Generate new revenue streams. Accelerate the rate of innovation.

The important skills in open innovation (and really in open source as well): the ability to lead in large groups, a talent for organizing smart mobs, ability to be persuasive in multiple contexts and spaces, an understanding that each context and space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique, measure responsiveness to other people's request for engagement, fluency in working w/different kids of capital (natural, intellectual, social, financial, other), fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles (design is so important in all aspects of technology), open authorship, ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexiby, thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles and big picture, filterining meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities... the ability to sense who would make the best collaborators on a particular topic.

Open Toolkit: An Innovation Framework

1. Create the culture
2. Develop the skills (such as being able to ask the right question, ability to frame question)
3. Identify participants
4. Assess risk and confidentiality
5. Tools/platforms
6. Determine solution type

My Starbucks Idea as an example.

Principles of openness:

• encourage solution finders, not problem solvers.
• tap the collective intelligence of networks.
• cooperate to compete.
• cultivate transparency.
• engage with failure.

 Interesting book came out earlier this year called The Global Brain. He recommends it and talks about network-centric innovation.

Can't go it alone...