Open Innovation
Innovation transforms ideas or inventions into value-generating goods or services. Open Innovation is the ability to innovate with partners by sharing risk and reward.
FastTrack is a strong proponent of Open Innovation, in all its forms — cocreation, collaborative innovation, coproduction, crowdsourcing, etc — and has been involved in the debate around collaborative innovation since early 2008! Our Open Innovation practice builds naturally on our experience in knowledge sharing and collaboration: when we facilitate collaboration between multiple stakeholders (suppliers, academic or private research centers, partners or competitors, whether from the same industry or not), we set the stage for Open Innovation to happen.
Supporting every stage of the innovation process
For FastTrack, Open Innovation is a natural extension of the traditional innovation process. With our consulting partners, we can help at every stage of the innovation process, in facilitating the external contributions or validations, such as with:
- cocreation or crowdsourcing in the ideation stage,
- exploratory prototyping and/or validation with end-users in the design stage,
- setting-up coproduction in the development stage,
- social media or viral marketing strategies at product/service launch.
To be successful in Open Innovation, it is essential to understand its challenges for the Industry:
- Technology (crowdsourcing platforms, collaborative software)
- Process (Innovation life-cycle from ideation to market)
- Legal (agreements, trust; protecting IP rights)
- Competency (matching solvers with seekers)
- Organizational (roles and responsibilities of partners, intermediaries and platform operators)
- Financial (fair reward mechanisms between stakeholders)
Facilitating the relationship between parties
Whatever the type of innovation, our approach is always the same: we aim to change the relationship between stakeholders in order to build, within a framework of mutual trust, a sustainable and balanced partnership. Our approach enables you to benefit, with increased confidence and reduced risk, from the experience and expertise of external partners.