The importance of innovation for the company is already well known by company executives. Managers understand and accept the need for innovation, but in many cases the commitment to implement powerful innovation strategies in the company is very low.
As already highlighted in one of my previous posts, innovation and especially open innovation requires a specific set of capabilities and skills. But not every top manager is actually possessing these skills need for implementing winning open innovation strategies within the company.
Stefan Lindegaard refers to a study of the "Center for Creative Leadership" (2007) where 50% of company leaders believe that their company is a world-class innovator. We can clearly see the bias in these results. Most SMEs often don't even have an institutionalized innovation managemen and more often these companies are not even innovative at all. Especially in case of service companies the role of innovation is often completely forgotten because innovation is perceived solely as product innovation and not as process or business model innovation.
Considered as a whole, it appears that company executives would like their company to be innovative, but something prevents them from actually being innovative.
Risk averseness
Radical innovation is always risky. And not every top executive wants to risk his/her career by putting all egs in one basket. It is obvious that risk averseness could prevent developing novel products and innvoations.
Particularly when you open up your company for open innovation, there is the risk of negative effects on the company when e.g. a market get cannibalized through a new open source product. We see, that the risk of open innovation is even higher than in closed innovation. (but of course, there is usually a greater outcome)
Hence, open innovation requires even less risk averse company executives. Many companies try to reduce risk by just utilizing external ideas through crowdsourcing communities (so called open innovation initiatives or communities). This significantly reduces the risk for the company. But it also reduces chances. Furthermore, open innovation is more than crowdsourcing.
Controllability
Dealing with external stakeholders leads to an environment full of uncertainties. As managers are desperately trying to reduce their risk, they are also trying to reduce uncertainty through an increase in control. Managers like to have full control over a process.
But open innovation requires company executives to give away a significant share of control to external stakeholders. As already mentioned before, companies are currently discovering compromises like crowdsourcing. Innovation communities and crowdsourcing are still designed as a semi-peremable membrane: Ideas and innovation comes into the company but not the other way round.
But in our current attention economy it gets increasingly difficult to attract innovation solvers. Companies which are not willing to also provide informations might soon loose in the fight for attention.
To sum up: Company executives need to step back from completely controlling their innovation process.
Proactivity
In the closed innovation paradigm the company usually waited for results from their own R&D department. In an open innovation world we know, that not all the best people work in our company, which is why the company has to step out and search for them.
But companies are still very closed. When someone finally comes into a top management position, he/she is used to pay attention on what is going on within the company, not outside.
Company executives tend to overrate themselves
I suppose, that company executives still overrate (respectively underrate) themselves and their company on these four characteristics: innovativeness, risk averseness, controllability and proactivity. If we just had executives like all the innovation self-assessment studies suggest, open innovation would already be a commodity.
