Open innovation, Sustainability and Social Media
The future calls for radical change, we all know this. Although many small things are happening, it is quite clear that much bigger shifts are needed in order to meet the major challenges posed, in climate change, energy, water, poverty eradication and in restoring ecosystems. Big changes calls for quantum innovation. We need to move away from thinking small to thinking big changes. These changes require more strategic and more innovative rethinking and redoing of current practices. We need to seriously rethink and redesign how many businesses and systems work to build our society. This is not the regular habit of most organizations. On the contrary, almost all organizations are systematically working with incremental innovation or development, which means that you look for small improvements that can be done without really changing the way you work.Incremental innovation unfortunately has diminishing returns. You can only achieve so much if you're not prepared to make more radical changes to how you operate. You pick the "low hanging fruit", but when that is done, continued improvements are more difficult.How do you achieve more radical, "quantum innovation"? Let's strart by saying that you do not do it by asking the same people as last year to come up with new solutions to the same problems as last year. Typically, however, this is how most organizations work. Innovation is addressed "inside the box" by a development team inside the organization.Quantum innovation require innovation processes of a different kind. Typically, break-through innovations are not made within disciplines or within companies. Rather, they are done at the unexpected intersections between disciplines or unexpected cross-overs between businesses. This is more difficult, but it is quite possible to stimulate. There are essentially two ways to stimulate cross-over innovation. The first is controlled, where you use a defined process for cross-over innovation and bring together a team with complementary, cross-fertilizing competencies. The second is to turn to open innovation systems. Open innovation is characterized by a process where you define the boundaries of the area, but then let go of the control and let people contribute to the innovation in a collaborative manner. This can be done in different ways, but it is clear, that the use of social media to bring a lot of people into the system can be an effective way. Internet and social media as channels for collaborative open innovation can be very powerful, as can be seen as in the case of Linux.Fortunately, the processes of innovation are getting faster and faster. Increasing efficviency in social media and intermediary innovation platforms are incredible. Additionally, the increasing wealth of knowledge increases the opportunities for cross-over innovation.There is also an additional connection which is important. Sustainability issues pose great challenges. The nature of these challenges are typically that they need to be approached from a systems changing perspective, since it is our current systems structure that have created the problems. "We cannot solve problems by applying the same thinking which created the problems", as Einstein put it. This means that there are several reasons why systems changing, radical innovation is needed in order to address sustainability issues. On one hand the required speed of change, and the diminishing returns from incremental innovation. On the other hand, the fact that the issues are indeed systems issues that need to be approach on a higher level.This means that we have an interesting and necessary convergence of disciplines, between sustainability, open innovation and social media. By applying the latest knowledge and tools in these fields, we can achieve remarkable and necessary results for the world.