Five questions about open innovation with Stefan Lindegaard

Stefan is author of the recently published book The Open Innovation Revolution, and blogs regularly on 15inno.com and stefanlindegaard.com.

We see a lot of commonalities between the open source way and the key concepts of open innovation, and thought inviting Stefan to come share his knowledge about open innovation with the opensource.com audience might be a good way to spur dialog between people in open source and open innovation communities.

In preparation for the webcast, we’ve asked Stefan five questions about subjects he may cover in more detail on September 1.

CHRIS: Early in your book, The Open Innovation Revolution, you share an idea that came out of one of your discussions with innovation leaders: “Embracing the outside requires that you know the inside.” Why do you think companies struggle so much to understand their own internal innovation model? How does this hinder their ability to pursue open innovation strategies?

STEFAN: Companies have chronic issues making innovation happen internally. This has many reasons. Executives might not fully understand innovation, the organization is not trained for innovation or there is just not enough focus on how to make innovation happen. On the latter, I can add that only very few companies actually have an innovation strategy that is aligned with the overall corporate strategy.