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far towards facilitating the transfer of ideas from one industry to another. Extrapolate the idea of one mechanical engineer not wanting to get outside their comfort zone to consider potential solutions from other domains to a whole company full of similarly biased mechanical engineers and it becomes possible to see why so few companies are successfully able to make the highly disruptive shift from doing things by a different means. From an organizational perspective, to make the world’s best screws you need to employ the best screw-designing talent. You fundamentally don’t employ the world’s best, say, glue chemists. Glue may well turn out to be a better way of joining component A to component B, but your screw-designing talent is highly likely to tell you that this is not the case whether it is true or not.

‘Yes, But’..

Even if incumbent designers and engineers can be convinced of the potential merits of a solution from another domain, the almost inevitable next problem is that the specific context of the originating domain is inherently different from the context of the domain looking for a new solution.

By way of example, the author recently had the opportunity to work on the problem of removing coriander seeds from their shells. The coriander industry has traditionally solved the problem by using a rotating drum to mechanically fragment the shells. Extraction efficiencies using this kind of mechanical solution can sometimes drop as low as 20%, which basically means that 80% of otherwise good coriander seeds get thrown away with the husks. The coriander process engineers, however, understood rotating drums and were basically looking for a better mechanical system. They were not looking for a system using rapidly changing pressures or ultrasound, but it turned out that here were a pair of potential ways to lift the extraction efficiency to the high 90s in percentage terms.

After overcoming the initial out-of-comfort-zone shock of considering non-mechanical solutions to the problem, the next hurdle arrived when the specifics of the transfer were examined. Getting pistachios out of pistachio shells frequently uses the rapidly changing pressure solution to achieve its desired outcome. The porosity of a pistachio shell and the porosity of a coriander seed husk, however, are different. Directly attempting to transfer the pistachio solution to the coriander context would likely result in the need to ‘soak’ the coriander at the high pressure for a much longer period of time. Given the importance of speed in any production process, this was obviously a problem for the coriander process engineers. It could very easily, in fact, have been used as an excuse for rejecting the pressure-based solution – ‘pressure sounds interesting, but the process is too slow’. The ‘yes, but’ expression is very often used in this kind of solution-rejecting mode. In the majority of cases, ‘yes, but’ is allowed to kill many potentially very good solutions much too quickly. Any ‘yes, but’, however, is merely the expression of a contradiction – we want something, but something stops us from achieving it. According to TRIZ, someone somewhere will already have solved such problems (Reference 3). In order to tap into such solutions, TRIZ requires problem solvers to translate the desired outcome and the thing preventing that outcome from being achieved into a Contradiction Matrix tool. For the coriander problem, that contradiction centres around the need to increase the speed of the process and the thing preventing the speed from being increased relates to the pressure and the difficulty of getting the high pressure outside the husk through and onto the inside of the husk. Figure 5 illustrates how this conflict can be mapped onto the 2003 version of the Matrix (Reference 4):

Figure 5: Mapping The Coriander Problem Onto The Contradiction Matrix

The ‘Suggested Inventive Principles’ shown at the bottom of the figure represent the generic solutions used by others to resolve similar problems elsewhere. It is beyond the purpose and intention of this paper to discuss how those generic solutions were translated into actual solutions to the coriander problem (needless to say; they were). Rather the point is that unless the coriander process engineers had known about the Contradiction Matrix tool, any candidate solution with a ‘yes, but’ was highly likely to have been rejected prematurely.

Tacit Knowledge

To an extent, nearly all open innovation projects seek to resolve tacit knowledge problems by introducing a development and/or validation programme into the contractual relationship they form with a solution provider. Such validation programmes are designed to transfer the knowledge from technology owner to problem owner. The commercial agreements made between the various parties is required to ensure that all are aligned in terms of their rights and obligations. The fourth reason that open innovation initiatives go wrong is that, by definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that the domain experts are unable to formally communicate to third parties. The open innovation scenario tends to double the extent of the tacit knowledge transfer problem since it involves two parties, both with their own tacit knowledge from their respective domains, and both unlikely to understand the context and conditions within the other operates. Tacit knowledge transfer is thus the most difficult of the four problems discussed here. On the plus side, it is a problem that only tends to appear after the other three have been successfully overcome.

On the negative side, there are few established formal ways and means for eliciting tacit knowledge. Perhaps the best of these ways is something that again forms a part of the systematic innovation toolkit. By encouraging the various different stakeholders in a problem to construct function and attribute analysis (FAA) models, for example, individuals are forced to break-down the complex relationships present in any situation down to the constituent parts. Very often even people from within the same domain find that the FAA model highlights the existence of perspective differences that, while they continue to exist, make improvement of the system difficult.

Putting It All Together

Open Innovation as a concept makes considerable sense. Because that concept is still relatively new, companies are still finding their way when it comes to capitalising on the potential. The main theme of this paper is that too often at this point in time, open innovation is in effect being used as a means of solving the wrong problem faster. Failing faster is preferable to failing slowly, but better yet would be to find ways and means to encourage problem owners to define better problems. In turn ‘defining better problems’ means resolving some of the potentially enormous cultural problems within organisations.

Someone that has been employed and rewarded by an organisation for doing one thing is very unlikely to disrupt him or herself (Reference 5). Until this problem is resolved, the open innovation community is likely to find itself in a downward spiral whereby less and less solution providers participate because they see none of their previous solutions being successfully commercialised.

Once it can be resolved (there are typically business contradictions that prevent it from happening – in which case Reference 6 is a resource that in effect says ‘someone, somewhere already solved this kind of problem too), Figure 6 charts a process that offers the opportunity to overcome the other Open Innovation problems identified through the course of this paper. The left hand side of the figure illustrates the required process steps;

The right hand side identifies the tools and strategies designed to allow each step of the process to be completed in a systematic and reproducible manner.

Figure 6: (Systematic) Open Innovation Protocol

While it is probably a truism that ‘none of us is as smart as all of us’, it is also true to say that the problem solving part of the innovation story is very often the easy part. Especially when compared with defining the ‘right’ problem to go and solve. Until the Open Innovation community successfully grasps and manages that conflict, it will continue to be yet another big idea that remains just that. While it remains to be seen whether Open Innovation is a ‘necessary’ part of the innovation equation, it is already clear that it is not ‘sufficient’ in its own right. Open Innovation needs to open itself to the idea that someone, somewhere already solved the problems it currently faces.

References

1) Utterback, J., ‘Mastering The Dynamics of Innovation’, Harvard Business School Press, 1993.

2) Function Database, www.systematic-innovation.com, Links.

3) Mann, D.L., ‘Hands-On Systematic Innovation’, IFR Press, 2nd Edition, 2007.

4) Mann, D.L., Dewulf, S., Zlotin, B., Zusman, A., ‘Matrix 2003: Updating The TRIZ

Contradiction Matrix‘, Creax Press, 2003.

5) Christensen, C.M., Johnson, C.W., Horn, M.B., ‘Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change The Way The World Learns’, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2008.

6) Systematic Innovation E-Zine, ‘Some Contradictions Are More Important Than Others: Managing Conflict Complexity’, Issue 22, November 2003.

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