It has been more than ten years since the concept of open innovation began to spread. And understood as those radical changes in the world of ideas and their management.

If we compare it with traditional innovation, which aims to keep everything under control, perhaps as a way to protect intellectual property and a classic model of competitiveness, now obsolete, which apparently is no longer being governed only by inventions from a company, but it is now valid to think, contribute and develop innovation that arises from different sources such as innovation centers, universities and individuals themselves.

The meaning of open innovation, which one of the experts defines as “the use of internal and external flows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for the external use of said innovation”. Understanding that this concept flows from the outside to the organizations and vice versa. Open innovation goes beyond collaboration between two companies, and for this the design and management of innovation groups will be important. With this concept, the use of knowledge extends throughout the communities.

Nowadays, the main factor of competitiveness is innovation, and it should be; open. Not all innovative people work in our company. And for those that do, it will be essential to find and collaborate with other innovative people from other parts of the world. Only then will the company be able to innovate successfully. Also, you must accept failure. Innovation does not exist without risk and no company can innovate effectively if it does not learn to manage it. If you’ve never failed, then you’ve never tried anything really important! Fostering a company culture that values useful failure and learns from it is essential to innovate successfully. A very important point of innovation is the business model and not only in technology. A better business model is more powerful than better technology. Successful companies often end up trapped in their business model. You need to learn how to improve or even change the business model to continue to prosper once it becomes obsolete.

You must learn to monitor the business model, technologies, knowledge management and intellectual property. There are two main avenues through which ideas flow in open innovation: from the outside in and from the inside out. The outside-in option implies opening the company’s innovation processes to many types of information and contributions from outside. Open innovation from the inside out, meanwhile, requires organizations to allow their own unused or underused ideas to go outside so that others can use them in their companies and business models. In this era where information, ideas and technologies flow and are widely exchanged, evolving rapidly, it is very inefficient to pretend to do it all yourself. The wide collaboration offered by universities, technology centers and other companies with capacities in areas of interest to the business model should be taken advantage of.