Dear readers,
i'm sorry for my absence in the last six weeks. I was working on several projects and especially data collection for my open innovation research project kept me busy 24x7. Anyway, today we will take a look on what previously happened in the world of open innovation. Not only in the last six weeks, but from 2006.
As I already wrote in some of my previous posts, the term open innovation is increasingly hyped by social and also classic media. Blogs around the topic of open innovation and crowdsourcing are continuously popping up. My Twitter RSS-feed about open-innovation related tweets already has 650 unread items for the last weeks. And not only bloggers but also academic researchers and practitioners are entering the world of innovation as the provisional programme of the ISPIM conference 2009 shows: The conference topic is "The Future of Innovation" and as we can see from the provisional programme, 21 presentations are solely focussed on "open innovation"!
Based on this overflow of interest I ask you if Open Innovation is the future, or if it is just hyped? Let's take an aggregated look at the rise of popularity from 2006 till May 2009:
Hype based on Google search volume
(click on picture to enlarge)
Based on the Google search volume we compare open innovation with crowdsourcing and mass customization. We see that volume of mass customization is already decreasing, indicating a strong decline in popularity. On the other hand, open innovation started quite well in 2006, but since 2008 crowdsourcing is getting very strong and popular. This coherent with my own observations that crowdsourcing is often mixed up with open innovation.
Now, to assess the hype potential we will take a look at three other hypes: "Web 2.0", "Second Life" and "Twitter":
Although you can see a clear decline for "Web 2.0", it is difficult to say if this is already the phase of "disillusionment" (according to Gartner's Hype Cycle) or if Web 2.0 is already coming to a steady plateu.
If we compare again to "Second life", it gets very clear what a real hype looks like. It even gets more interesting, when we add twitter. Twitter is currently experiencing an incredible hype. What is especially interesting here, is that the decline has already begun in April 2009.
So according to these search volume data, open innovation doesn't look like a typical hype. Let's take a look at the blogs:
Blog posts
The chart above is based on data from technorati.com. As wee can see here, the number of posts per week related to "open innovation" has suddenly bursted in October 2008. Well, of course we don't know how valid the data source from technorati is. And after some research I found that also other terms (Web 2.0, Crowdsourcing) experienced a burst like this.
Also other data sources like blogpulse (Nielsen BuzzMetrics) show the same pattern. In the last 8 months there was no significant increase in open innovation related blog posts. In this case we (again) must refuse the trend hypothesis.
It would be great to integrate even more data sources into this analysis, especially Twitter. But as far as I know, there is no analysis tool so far, that aggregates tweets over the last one or two years. I guess we will have to wait for that.
Conclusion
Summarizing the main findings, I don't think that open innovation is currently hyped too much. However, I would expect a first decline in interest (and then tweets & postings) maybe at the end of 2009 or mid-2010. It is very difficult to predict the future hype, as the open innovation trend is hardly comparable to the Web 2.0 hype (which was way faster).
Comments
Open innovation as a concept is to work with your partners, customers and people outside your normal sphere of influence.
Web 2.0 is laying the foundation of technologies which can eventually lead to meaningful innovation. It is the like early days of music players, recording industry, mp3 and piracy. We wait for iPod like innovation that brings together all the pieces and leads us to the next level.