All companies can benefit from Open Innovation
Open Innovation SME – When we talk about using Open Innovation in R&D, we immediately think about large corporates. However, Open innovation can be particularly useful and beneficial for other types of companies. SMEs are a perfect example of this.
Open Innovation in practice
Open Innovation differs from traditional innovation in that it makes extensive use of means external to the company to innovate. For example, Open Innovation will use external contributions to generate new ideas: idea competitions, crowdsourcing, data mining in social networks, etc.
Open Innovation can also seek answers to technical questions from other companies or academic experts, before starting the development of an internal solution. In this way, the company’s internal resources are used differently: they drive innovation, integrate it into the company’s processes and products, and extend the company’s network to a global dimension.
How to check if Open Innovation is suitable for SMEs?
A European scale project has been initiated to test Open Innovation through several SME models as well as across different cultures. This project was named OPENiSME (for Open Innovation for SMEs).
No less than 500 SMEs have had access to Open Innovation solutions, thanks in particular to innovation intermediaries.
In fairly traditional cases of use, SMEs turn to Open Innovation to find a solution to a problem they cannot solve for various reasons. Open Innovation allows SMEs to rely on experts to solve their problems.
The advantage for SMEs to find an expert in a specific area of expertise is that the company does not have to start from scratch. This expert may even already have the solution to the problem. SMEs therefore benefit from fast and qualitative results at a reduced cost!
This project, which ended in 2018 after 3 years of operation, was obviously analysed in order to draw conclusions.
The results of the OPENiSME project
The conclusions of this project were extremely positive. It has been shown that SMEs can benefit greatly from Open Innovation, just like large industrial groups.
Three major lessons emerged for these SMEs. discover them through this free ebook which covers the subject in detail
![[Videos] What you need to know about ideXlab’s Open Innovation platform](https://blog.idexlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/img_idexlab_video-300x193.png)
![[Videos] What you need to know about ideXlab’s Open Innovation platform](https://blog.idexlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/img_idexlab_video-672x372.png)