Open Innovation: Achieving Competitiveness and Sustainable Growth

In today's fast and competitive, globalized marketplace, internal-only sources of innovation can no longer ensure an Enterprise's ideas leadership, no matter how large and capable their internal idea generation processes are.

The pressures to constantly innovate, to ceaselessly deliver compellingly better new products and solutions, require constant and reliable access to the best ideas out there, period - no matter whence they may arise .

To remain at the leading edge of their business space, forward-thinking Enterprises therefore now increasingly seek innovative ideas beyond the confines of their R&D departments. Worthy, commercially valid innovative ideas have been convincingly shown to arise from anywhere: from a wholly separate industry, from another country, as well as from one's own backyard and R&D lab. Hence, Innovation today is best cultivated globally .

By the same token, an innovative idea will add value to an Enterprise only if 1- that Enterprise catches the idea first, before anyone else 2- acquires it - the idea becomes an ownership of that Enterprise, and 3- implements it quickly and capably.

To achieve this, Enterprises need a methodology to efficiently scour the world for valid innovative ideas. To that end, they establish 'canvassing' networks - tools and procedures designed to swiftly recognize and snap up useable ideas. How efficient this global innovation generation network is hinges on its quality. In other words, a Company's profitability and marketplace success increasingly depends on how good its innovation generation network is.

The way such a network works is primarily by pro-actively bringing together capable potential sources of innovation - such as Universities, R&D labs, SMEs, start-ups, think tanks, denizens of incubator parks, lone innovators, etc., with the Enterprise. When Innovators meet Enterprises, new vistas are opened up, new visions, insights, and ideas as to how to shape the future are born.

Large Enterprises such as Procter & Gamble, Nokia, GlaxoSmithline, Henkel, and many others now routinely use Open Innovation to stay at the top of their game.

Open Innovation has now become an inescapable component of the winning Enterprise's strategy.

OPTEAM France and VENTURE2 are therefore joining forces to organize the first business Open Innovation seminar in France. Our purpose is to set forth its material advantages - regardless of the size, or the sector, of an Enterprise , which include( but are not limited to) :

• Faster Time to Market
• Lower development costs
• Complementary integratable developments, leading both to more advanced solutions, and more features, faster
• Much better utilization of available research
• 'Non-linear' advantages : Innovative development of saleable products or solutions that would not have been thought of or invented at all in the absence of OI.

as well as the best methodologies for implementation and deployment.