Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. By Henry Chesbrough. Harvard Business School Harvard Business School, officially named the Harvard Business School: George F. Baker Foundation, and also known as HBS, is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University. Press, 227 pages. $35. Ignoring anything that was "not invented here This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details. This article has been tagged since September 2007. ," writes Henry Ches-brough, is an approach akin to an ostrich ostrich, common name for a large flightless bird (Struthio camelus) of Africa and parts of SW Asia, allied to the rhea, the emu and the extinct moa. It is the largest of living birds; some males reach a height of 8 ft (244 cm) and weigh from 200 to 300 lb sticking its head firmly in the sand. Indeed, he's certain that the old ways of doing technology research--which tended to exclude ideas hatched outside that immediate company or location--are self-defeating. Chesbrough--who has an intriguing resume that lists a Ph.D, stints as an operating technology executive and Bain & Co. consultant, and now a professorship at Harvard Business School--drew inspiration for the book from a study he did of the famed Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, Calif. Xerox had mismanaged that facility, he concluded, by acting as if it had a monopoly on all the smart ideas and the top people in the field, yet "most of the spin-offs from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated, Palo Alto, CA, www.parc.com) Founded in 1970, PARC is a Xerox subsidiary involved in high-tech research and development. Although Xerox's headquarters are in Stamford, Connecticut, and manufacturing and marketing are in Rochester, New York, PARC is created their value by linking to and exploiting knowledge that Xerox did not have." Open innovation, as he presents it, means that ideas can come from inside or outside a company, and products can go to market from inside or outside, as well. Newer firms, he says, have often embraced this notion, turning to alliances, other companies or universities to help nurture ideas. Older, larger companies, however, may still be struggling to change old mindsets and the legacy of many years of success through a kind of closed-shop development process. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Chesbrough presents a number of detailed examples, using companies like Lucent Technologies, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Corp. and Intel Corp. In his view, the new paradigm New Paradigm In the investing world, a totally new way of doing things that has a huge effect on business. Notes: The word "paradigm" is defined as a pattern or model, and it has been used in science to refer to a theoretical framework. is an approach that conceives the most appropriate business model for a technology, whether that exists within the company or must be developed through licensing, partnering or venturing. In these days of scarce resources and technological ferment ferment /fer·ment/ (fer-ment´) to undergo fermentation; used for the decomposition of carbohydrates. fer·ment n. 1. , Open Innovation reads, more than anything, like common sense. |
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