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OPEN INNOVATION


OPEN INNOVATION STRATEGIES:


T e current worldwide economic slowdown and ever decreasing budgets have not diminished the need to innovate and bring new products and technologies to market. On the contrary, it is now even more important to reduce development times and research costs in order to provide additional revenue streams or avoid being overtaken by competitors. T e fi nancial woes of Kodak and RIM, the producer of the Blackberry smart phone, illustrate how even previous market leaders in their fi eld can decline when they fail to innovate continually and successfully.


‘Open innovation’ as a concept was coined in 2003 by US business academic Henry Chesbrough. It accepts that there is innovation or expertise outside of your immediate company that could be harvested for your own gains. T e challenge lies in identifying those partnerships, collaborations, licensing deals, acquisitions or potential new employees to feed into and accelerate your innovation cycle.


One potential starting point for looking at open innovation opportunities is to visualise a technology landscape by portfolio size and strength coupled with company resources, as aff orded by the intellectual business intelligence tool Innography.


Patents, Revenue, & Litigation per Company


HOMING IN ON OPPORTUNITIES With the economic crisis continuing to bite, smart companies are looking at new ways to source innovative technology. Ian Pearce explains.


In the Innography technology visualisation below, each sphere represents a company’s patent portfolio and their relative sizes. T e position on the x-axis indicates the ‘Vision’ of that portfolio (a calculation of the relative value of the portfolio) and the y-axis completes the picture with information on the company (‘Resources’) owning that portfolio.


Companies represented by large spheres towards the top right-hand side of the chart are likely to be large, multinational companies with lots of patents in this area of technology, ie, the key well-known companies working and developing in this area.


Of more interest, though, in an open innovation environment are the spheres encountered as we move down the Resources axis, as these are likely to be more localised, specialised companies— maybe start-ups or venture capital-backed organisations. T ese types of companies could be prime candidates for in-licensing agreements, partnerships, joint ventures or may even be acquisition targets, especially if the Vision of their portfolio is strong and towards the right- hand side of the x-axis. Alternatively, these may be your competitors in a few years’ time, so this analysis serves as an early warning to monitor them over the coming years.


Vision (% Patents + % Classifi cations + % Citations) 58 World Intellectual Property Review January/February 2012


Companies represented by a small sphere towards the top of the chart may also be of interest. Although big in terms of company size, in this technology analysis a small sphere indicates a restricted patent portfolio. T is may indicate that the collection of patents covers a fi eld which


www.worldipreview.com


Resources (% Revenue + % Locations + % Litigation)


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