The wave of interest in Open Innovation (OI) appears to still be on an upward trajectory. Despite the fact that, when measured in a true innovation sense of ‘how much profit did this generate?’ the statistics reveal very high levels of failure. According to our latest studies with clients, OI projects are failing to deliver the desired outcomes in over 98% of all cases. To put that figure in context, an OI project is about 4 times more likely to end in failure than a project in which an organisation decided to not look outside their four walls for solutions.
In attempting to answer the question of why this is the case, it has become clear that some organisations do considerably better than others in terms of success rate. Which in turn begged the question, ‘what, if anything, are the successful OI practitioners doing that the unsuccessful ones are not?’
