Open business models and marketing innovation
In March, we held a poll for CIM members in London, asking you to gauge the impact of Open Innovation on your organisation. The results showed that almost two thirds of your organisations have adopted some form of open innovation in terms of co-creation, a creative approach or changes to internal structure.
Yet despite the much heralded advantages, one third of organisations don’t yet use the concept at all. So are they, and many of us, missing a trick?
Tatiana Schofield, Chair of the Greater London Region Board, is an innovation management expert. In this second article in her series on Open Innovation, she shares her insights with examples of commercial applications.
Tatiana says:
“Open innovation offers enormous opportunities for marketers to engage customers in product co-development, test new products and services and get customers’ feedback. We are seeing a growing number of corporate competitions, collaboration platforms and idea-sharing tools to explore and exploit the knowledge and resources of users, customers and communities.
I previously highlighted My Starbucks Idea innovation as one of the examples of customer engagement, in ‘Exploring Open Innnovation and marketing’. The coffee company went further still in their innovation and pioneered mobile payment through a Square app which is taking the American market by storm. The process is easy, secure and free. So watch this space to adjust your pricing and payment strategies!
Another great example is companies that use open innovation to experiment and access the ‘pool of wisdom’ from the start-up and SMEs community. Tesco has recently established an innovation lab to accelerate its innovation and create new customer experiences.
Another giant, Coca-Cola, is also turning to start-ups to learn about ‘game-changing’ innovation for sustainable growth. The lesson learned was business model innovation and keeping balance between agility and scale.
The benefits of collaboration are increasingly recognised by high-tech and biopharmaceutical companies too. AstraZeneca, a leading pharmaceutical company, has recently launched a web-based platform to collaborate with a wide range of partners. The aim of the initiative is to accelerate development of treatments by sharing knowledge and resources.
These examples give marketers new tools and directions to look beyond their traditional value chain and engage wider communities in their marketing processes.”
Following our successful Open Innovation event on 24 April, Dr Peter Thomond of Clever Together, provides his insights on crowdsourcing along with case studies.