[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Since the days of Thomas Edison’s Invention Factory, new
product innovation has been the engine of long-term growth and a
buffer in times of economic weakness for world-class companies. Yet
even respected research powerhouses like British Telecom, Siemens,
and Fujitsu are today finding it more difficult to make their
innovation investments pay. There is too much piling up on the
shelf, and there are too few breakthroughs that lead to new markets
and higher growth. In short, R&D labs once prized for their
independence and proprietary research find they’re having a
terrible time extracting value from their own work.“To increase the return on their R&D, successful innovators
are finding they must complement their in-house R&D with
external technologies, and offer up their own technologies to
outsiders. R&D at large companies is shifting from its
traditional inward focus to more outward-looking management–open
innovation–that draws on technologies from networks of
universities, startups, suppliers, and competitors…”