
Theory is great but what should companies actually do? Here is a list of open innovation and innovation content projects to do – making your open innovation mix.
Innovation projects
Strategy
Write down the innovation strategy including customer, partner, and internal feedback.
Suggested frequency: two per year.
Opportunities
Publish innovation opportunities to customers, partners, and internally. These can be simple online pages, documents, presentations.
Suggested frequency: few per year.
Innovation partners
Make a presentation about your skills or ideas and talk to companies and individuals who you think might be interested in working with you on them.
Suggested frequency: one per month.
Training
Remind your customers, partners, and internal teams how innovative your company is, how you innovate, what your plans us, how they can innovate with your company.
Suggested frequency: every quarter.
Innovation content projects
Innovation posts
Publish quick and easy explanations of your innovations, products, and projects on your innovation channel.
Suggested frequency: few per week.
Short videos
Publish 10 – 60 sec videos which explain your innovations on all major social media.
Suggested frequency: one per week.
Long videos
These videos explain your main innovations, products, and projects. They are used for years ahead.
Suggested frequency: one every two months.
Renders and infographics
These are images which visually explain your innovations, products, and projects. They are used for years ahead.
Suggested frequency: one per month.
Landing pages
Make dedicated landing pages which explain your innovation and call customers and partners to participate in it.
Suggested frequency: you should have at least one innovation landing page.
Small campaigns
Small campaigns include articles, newsletter, digital advertising, and social media, and are great way to communicate more important innovation information.
Suggested frequency: one per week.
Big campaigns
Big campaigns include press, events, interviews, and all other digital and non-digital channels. They are used for product launches and similar big events.
Suggested frequency: two per year.
Open events
Open events can be digital or non-digital. They are an opportunity to answer questions from the public and are important in building an open rapport with customers and partners. They can also be internal.
Suggested frequency: one per month.
We provide openinnovation.me features and services to help you upgrade your open innovation mix. Contact Andrea at andrea@openinnovation.me for more information.
Market research, focus groups, social media comments, open innovation...
What is the difference between market research, focus groups, social media comments, and open innovation?
They all share the same goal – inform the company about what customers want. But they all use different methods, have different costs, and give different results. Most importantly, they are not in competition with each other, but they work together to complete the picture of what customers want.
Market research
Market research uses polls and interviews, and other similar methods which elicit very specific structured feedback from customers. Questions are designed by the company to be easily quantified in hope that more customers offer more input which is easy to process. Market research can be expensive and biased, but needs little change in the company.
Focus groups
Selected customers are asked for a more elaborate opinion. These are very controlled situations which can provide good insight but again in a very controlled way. Focus groups can be very expensive and biased, and they also need almost no change in the company.
Social media comments
They are free and abundant, but are very unstructured, hard to understand, and very biased. Most extreme comments can be in a minority but can still pull the company in a wrong direction. Social media comments do not need any change in the company.
Open innovation
Low cost and with minimum bias because of its focus on practical improvements, but it needs some changes in the company – which is actually good. All other three are external reactions which have very controlled effect on the company while open innovation builds a more transparent relationship with customers.
It is best to use all four together because they are not exclusive, but if you must chose one we suggest open innovation because of the low cost (thanks to openinnovation.me) and its direct and immediate positive impact on products.
To adopt open innovation email Andrea at andrea@openinnovation.me.