Open Innovation – Your Key to Success in an Economic Downturn
by Tyron Stading on December 17, 2008
While we’ve all known the U.S. has been in a recession for some time, NBER finally made it official, admitting that the current recession began in December 2007. This revelation begs the question, “What now?” My last post described how past recessions have led to increased litigation, but it didn’t cover innovation trends. The latest and most interesting of these trends is Open Innovation.
Open Innovation is most crucial in a down market when costs-cutting measures and layoffs are adopted and companies are once again required to do more with less. They no longer have the luxury of large R&D budgets and overhead expenses. Excessive budgets and long development cycles simply cannot be supported in such economic environments. Rather, companies need to get a product to market as quickly and inexpensively as possible — and Open Innovation represents a badly needed solution.
Today the term innovation tends to be overused business jargon that is meant to suggest a more effective use of business resources, but Open Innovation is actually something quite different. It’s a concept that acknowledges the reality that innovation happens everywhere — not just inside your corporate walls. Embracing Open Innovation means that you adopt the practice of acquiring innovative IP outside your company and merging it with your own IP pool.
The key to Open Innovation is where to find it. Ideas can be found everywhere, but finding those ideas that relate to a customer’s pain is difficult. Simply put, you need to know what you don’t know — a vexing task at best.
For example, pharmaceutical companies regularly work with universities to help harvest ideas and to commercialize them. But if you don’t have an established relationship with someone, how do you know when an opportunity even exists? While there is no short answer, the best advice I can give you is to seek out and discover customer pain.
In a down economic market, customer pain will speak the loudest. If a customer is not in pain, they won’t buy the aspirin. Focusing on customer pain will illuminate a path to its most appropriate solution.
To illustrate, let me provide a real-world example. One of our customers was considering a move into the Green technology space given its recent focus and customer demand. However, they soon discovered that there are many definitions for Green technology and the company needed to get to market quickly. Their conundrum: how do we meet this customer demand and fulfill their perception of the company as going Green, and still go to market without years of research delays?
The solution: rely on key words in your search that relate to the attributes of the problem (e.g. anti-microbial, recyclable, hygienic, odor controlling, etc). Doing so can yield opportunities outside your industry that you might not have considered. This company did exactly that and what they discovered was startling.
The results initially seemed incorrect because they were previously unaware that the IP they uncovered even existed — precisely because it was outside their industry. By asking why something showed up outside their industry within their innovation landscape, they were able to discover what they didn’t know existed. The ultimate result was that they found a medical technology comprising all the attributes of the solution they were seeking as a naturally occurring substance.
Having this information in turn enabled them to get to market faster, create a new product, partner with a leading supplier and innovate without having to create it all in house — a perfect example of Open Innovation.
Simplify Your Search
by Roji John on September 02, 2008
Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. --Albert Einstein
One of the things I’m constantly asked about is the specifics of our search capability. I’ll often run down the list, from the common to the more obscure. Overall, the response to our breadth of options has been very positive.
I’ve even gotten involved with porting some of the queries from different engines to ours. This can be a dizzying experience. The level of complexity in some of these queries is amazing.
For the more involved case (and even for the simple one) it’s good to take a step back and focus on the goal of the project. Often the questions are much more mundane than the queries. What’s happened is that the user has been forced over time to modify the query to get a relevant data set. This caused a morphing of what was once probably something very simple and clear. Some users are so used to this that they can write (and even think) in this complex boolean logic.
The answer is usually not in directly porting the boolean logic to our system. By understanding the goal, the options available with Innography can often rescue us from this unnecessary complexity.
Being in the right vicinity is the most important part of the answer. I lightly touched on the advantages of the patent classification system in my last blog post. The classification system is one of the vicinities. By limiting your search space to relevant technologies and applications, your query can be simplified to more easily capture the relevant data.
There are other vicinities. A list of competitors, a date range, or even inventors can all be vicinities. Even business information such as revenues or the amount of litigation might give you a vicinity. It all depends on the final goal.
The filters available on the left side of any result set are how you can get to the right vicinity. I’ve been able to assist our users in transforming complicated, hierarchical boolean logic down to just a few plain keywords with a few filters. When that happens, even I can understand what’s being searched.
The added advantage to simplified search is that our users are able to easily modify it to get immediate insights. This changes the game. It makes the search process about insights rather than data retrieval. Pushing the insights into the search process gives our users the power to make decisions during the research rather than as a result of it. It might take a little while to get used to this process, but once implemented our users find it invaluable.
The Prior Art Paradox
by Doug Miller on July 30, 2008
Admittedly I am not an IP attorney, or for that matter even a patent or IP expert. Having been introduced to the market only a year and half ago, a lot of the concepts and practices are new to me. I have to admit that I find it to be a very fascinating field. One of the things that has really jumped out to me while talking to our customers and prospects is the divide—make that chasm—that exists in corporate attitude and policy regarding whether to allow inventors, engineers, and researchers to view prior art around inventions and projects they are working on. This is one of those issues that it seems there is are only two colors black and white—no shades of grey.
On the one hand, many companies do not want researchers to search for or view any prior art as part of their standard research process. The thinking here, driven it seems by corporate legal, is that by not allowing the inventors to search for or view related art that the company is maintaining “plausible deniability” in the event of any potential future infringement actions. And in fact, current patent legislation fully defines and supports this practice, and to a large extent encourages patent filers to perform minimal prior art searching on their own. I personally think this is one of the flaws in the current patent system and the reason that in many cases prior art is missed by examiners, and is a great argument for the currently being tested patent peer review and the move toward patent legislation reform. (NB: This is my personal opinion and does not represent the views of Innography). This approach represents the traditional view of intellectual property as a defensive only mechanism, still held by a large number of companies.
On the other hand, is the approach that seems to be widely adopted by companies that are embracing innovative strategies and open innovation. Companies in this camp encourage researchers and engineers to fully understand the IP landscape. By exposing them to prior art and related IP from their field as well as other fields and industries, they are encouraging truly innovative and unique approaches to their projects. By seeing what has already been done in the area of their invention, they can invent around existing art to develop truly novel technologies. This approach often identifies opportunities for collaboration through licensing or partnering that can help these innovation-driven companies introduce new products to market faster. In these companies, an innovation approach has replaced the traditional courtroom approach and is leading to truly unique ideas being developed faster than ever before.
My own observation here is that I find the dichotomy to be striking, in fact more so than in any market I’ve ever been associated with. Perhaps it is a very good indicator of a shift in market behavior and attitudes and represents a new way of thinking about intellectual property as the intangible, leveragable asset that it is. Neither approach is right or wrong, but it is definitely an issue that finds companies polarized.
For our purposes as a company, it doesn’t really matter which camp our customers fall in since our product can support/accommodate either approach and we already have customers firmly entrenched in each camp. For my way of thinking the open approach makes more sense—but hey that’s just me!
Finding a Better Way
by Doug Miller on July 01, 2008
There is a better way, find it. --Thomas Edison
One of the things that has been most reinforced by Innography’s customers is the value of correlating multiple sources of information into a single view to gain more rapid time to results for various types of projects. Some of the use cases where this has particularly surfaced for our customers have been interesting.
Perhaps the best example is the ability to filter results of a patent query based on data that doesn’t exist in the patent records themselves. For example, for IP licensing, a technology landscape result set can be created using any number of discovery methods such as keywords, common or similar patent classifications, co-citation analysis among the most popular. That landscape can then be filtered based on company revenues of the assignee. For in-licensing a company might be interested in finding smaller companies that have some interesting innovation that might be more amenable to licensing their technology than some larger companies might. For out licensing many companies look for larger companies with a specific gap in their portfolio as a better revenue source. Both of these searches can be accomplished only if the patent landscape result set can be filtered on revenue because patent data has been correlated with company financial data.
Another case might in competitive intelligence to view a market landscape that is filtered by litigation propensity. Again a query against a specific technology can result in an interesting set of data. To gain even further insight, the ability to filter based on the litigation history of companies could indicate how protective some players in the particular market landscape are or even the market in general. In this case getting to results rapidly is even more difficult, because obtaining the litigation history and ranking companies accordingly is even more difficult, but the value of having litigation pre-correlated allows for very rapid, almost instantaneous results.
So for many that have been doing IP licensing, competitive intelligence, and patent research there is a better way, rapid results using correlated information sources. Our customers have found it. More and more prospective customers are finding it. So as Thomas Edison said--"find it.” Innography can help you do just that.
