Open Innovation and Co-creation

Last week I have visited two conferences, E-Day and Picnic. At both conferences 'crowdsourcing'  was discussed. It surprised me that one of the speakers brought up 'Open Innovation' as an example of co-creating products and services with your customers. 

In a recent research I used ' Open Innovation' as well. I reffered to Henry Chesbrough. Chesbrough wrote a book about this concept. In the foreword of this book John Seely Brown writes about 'innovating innovation'. John states that we are faced with two new realities: 

1. The networked world allows us to bring customers into the lab as a co-producer.
   
2. The smart people you need to innovate aren't members of any single team but are distributed all over the place in multiple institutions. Finding successful ways to work with them will lie at the heart of innovating innovation 
   

In my opinion 'Open Innovation' is not an example of co-creating but the possibility to co-create is a driver for 'Open Innovation'. 

Chesbrough describes in his book two ' paradigms': Closed Innovation and Open Innovation. 

Closed innovation is the way research & development is done by, mainly large companies, in the last centuries. It is an approach of accessing knowledge that is inwardly focused. 

'Open Innovation means that valuable ideas can come from inside or outside the company and can go to market from inside or outside the company as well. This approach places external ideas and external paths to market on the same level of importance as that reserved for internal ideas and paths to market during the Closed Innovation era." 

Open Innovation within the music industry could mean that a major record- or publishing company are not only innovating from inside the company (for instance adopting 360 deals) but also adopt innovations that were produced outside the company. Buying start ups with usefull technology to create better services to customers.