Since I’ve been working on “Open Innovation” now for quite some time, I want to raise some questions on the concept, especially when it comes to SME in the Digital Economy. Open Innovation seems to be an interesting new paradigm that puts forward a new thinking on how to run digital business models. This is still challenging in terms of innovation management and human resources development!
Thus, regarding the concept, not everything is entirely new: many SME in the Digital Economy have practiced Open Innovation before, maybe without knowing it 
– they developed new collaborative digital services in B2B networks, they involved freelancer (“prosumer”) in the development and design of digital products and services, they intensively managed inflow and outflow of knowledge since in those SMEs, creative communication is the baseline of innovation!
Now: Open Innovation – Old wine in New Bottles?
Recently I tried to attract interest on this issue by generating a new generic “buzzword”: “INNOVATION 3.0″ which in fact is lining-up innovation 1.0 (the former closed model) via innovation 2.0 (open model) with an “Open Innovation Third Way for SME”. What I call 3rd way is “building bridges while walking on it”. It is triggered by some decisive meta trends, to be described as follows:
- The properties of digital technologies favor Open Innovation in the Digital Economy, with attributes of being distributed, collaborative, interactive and often systemic.
- The shift to Open Innovation in the Digital Economy is – in contrast to other industry segments – an ongoing natural and evolutionary development, nothing special but still challenging.
- In future the challenges of Open Innovation will increase as a result of diminuishing threshholds in using enabling technologies by a broader community of prosumer of digital products and services (swarm intelligence).
- Swarm intelligence and increasing convergence of digital technologies rises additional requirements in terms of complex organizational and individual competences beyond professional skills, especially to develop new business models.
- The Digital Economy is therefore desperately in need for a smart, prospective and responsive competences monitoring system.
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Tags: Add new tag, Business model, Human resources, Innovation, Metatrends, Open Innovation