Lessons from a Failed Implementation of an Online Open Innovation Community in an Innovative Organization

With open innovation, firms look for ideas and their execution outside organizational boundaries—for example, through collaboration with suppliers and customers, and sometimes also with competitors. Open innovation thus distributes the innovation process and can result in improved innovativeness, minimized innovation-related risks and external commercialization of intellectual property. There are many examples of successful IT-enabled open innovation communities that have helped organizations to improve their innovativeness and solve innovation-related issues. But not all implementations have been successful. The full article describes one such case (referred to anonymously as “ElectriCo”), where the implementation failed even though the company’s top management nurtures a culture that fosters innovation. It does this by committing to innovation projects and acting as project sponsor, and facilitating cross-hierarchy communication. We identify the challenges ElectriCo faced and the reasons the open innovation initiative failed, and provide a framework with checkpoints and guidelines for assessing the likely success of implementing online open innovation communities. Following an internal analysis of the relative merits of offline and online open innovation approaches, and a survey of its customers, ElectriCo decided to establish an online open innovation community.