The recipe is quite clear, I believe. Start implementing Open Innovation and you will start accelerating your strategy. Søren Brogaard Jensen already established that Open Innovation is the way to go if you want to stay at the innovation forefront of your market in his previous blog post. Even though it may not be an easy change to make. It takes a little more than just a deep breath to make such a drastic strategic change. Understanding the benefits of this open approach could perhaps make the jump a little easier.

So let’s take a look at the speed factor of Open Innovation. How does this in fact work – getting to market faster through Open Innovation? How come that you can’t obtain the same speedy results on your own – the good old traditional way?

Letting the Experts Do What They Do Best

First of all, Open Innovation allows you to benefit from a “division of labor”. When you have specialists working intensely in each their area of expertise, you will obtain a higher level of efficiency.

It is just not possible for anyone to excel at everything. So why not let everyone do what they do best – and fastest?

Furthermore, when you divide product development into separate building blocks, it becomes possible to have several parallel working tracks. This means that you divide the overall innovation project into individual components in which the respective specialists work simultaneously. I do not believe it is possible for any company to have all the necessary resources internally. It can, however, be easily obtained if you just dare to look outside the company walls. By such division of the project and assignment of skilled resources each part of the project gets its own life and pace without being slowed down or put on hold by unrelated matters. Then at the end you bring it all together. That is efficiency at its best.

Letting Someone else Make All the Mistakes

Secondly, by implementing Open Innovation your time to market is also reduced since you will draw on existing knowledge and expertise. There is really no point in reinventing the wheel. So instead of starting from scratch in the innovation process, you can skip the early stages of research and the learning of the specific technology in question. Someone else already knows all of this. Why not exploit that? Someone else has already made all the beginner’s mistakes and has the invaluable experience that cannot be studied, only learned by doing.

This means that when you decide to change direction for your product management strategy towards more collaboration and openness, you will also heavily reduce the risk of mistakes and rework. Besides saving time, you can also focus your efforts where it matters the most to you.

Letting Your Organization Open up

The mind-set and way of working together both internally and externally also play an important role in achieving the maximum benefit of Open Innovation. It is crucial to build up an organizational culture that embraces openness and encourages an agile way of thinking. The traditional mind-set with the cards held close will quite simply stop Open Innovation before it even gets started as the whole nature of Open Innovation is about benefitting from each other’s expertise. In order to keep things moving at the desired accelerating pace it presupposes an incitement of openness at all levels.

Openness cannot just be a new fresh idea from a group of forward-thinking employees. It must be strategically implemented throughout the entire organization.

So. Time is of the essence, people! We all know it. While some spend their time worrying about the increased risk of imitation and fearing technology brought into their company from outside, others actually reach out for the advantages of opening up and ultimately, goes to market faster.