The companies are now moving beyond the processes with limited internal access to the information or without use of external information to more distributed information involving different areas and many stakeholders beyond the company. Secret ideas and information are not valuable as they had been before. The topic of June edition of Bilgi Cagi magazine is ‘open innovation’ which brings another perspective to the known innovation principles.
Customers are one of the main Sources of Innovation
Innovation is not limited to the internal sources of the company. In open innovation other stakeholders including company partners, customers, the competitors, universities, consultants, unions and associations are also the best source of innovation for a company.
As Şirin Elçi from Focus Innovation, points out new products and services that are prepared according to the customer needs and requirements do not provide enough profitability since they do not actually respond to the needs of the customers. However, in open innovation different stakeholders including the customers are involved in the innovation processes and by this way the companies can directly find out the real needs of the customers. She gave the Dell example that starts innovation studies by collecting necessary data from the customers through daily meetings, events, customer panels in order to focus to the real customers needs with their feedback.
Today, there are many modes of open innovation. Living lab is one of these concepts which adapt the laboratory based test-beds into real life environments. Living labs provide an open innovation environment as a collaboration platform with the involvement of companies, researchers, investors and end users where the end-users can be incorporated into the R&D and innovation processes of ICT based innovative products or services.
Leyla Arsan, TAGES CEO, states that today different institutions with different disciplines from different countries can make research in the same lab, they come together to develop research and technology projects. However, she also adds that there are still obstacles in front of open innovation in Turkey. Restrictions on internet access and difficulties in obtaining visa for the movement of people prevent people from involving in open research and innovation.
Bilgi Cagi magazine goes deeper into the open innovation issue with open innovation stories of IBM and Wikipedia through interviews with the representatives, articles of the topic experts with different perspectives of innovation and of Turkey’s stance in open innovation.
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