Here we present an approach to iterative innovation, which happens over time, all the time, of the relationships between those inside the business and those outside the business [but that need to be understood as part of it].
closed innovation
Innovation is never closed, this is an illusion. To understand this statement, it is necessary to look at the entire period of history where the craftsman was primarily responsible for the creation and production of consumer goods.
The craftsman, unlike the factory, for example, or at least the vast majority of them, is both producer and consumer of what they produce. Therefore, from the perspective of the craftsman, innovation has always been oriented towards the user, even if, at a certain point, it was the side that they used.
With the transition from crafts production to industrial production, we lost, for a long time, the role of using. Therefore, innovating was restricted to what we, producers who don’t use, have the capacity to produce. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the reasons why innovation started to be oriented from the inside out of the factories [business].
In the context of industries, innovation was restricted to what is on the inside of the business [the factory], on the outside were those who use it.
In this perspective, innovation in fact, the one that implies changing people, never happened behind closed doors, it’s just an illusion to innovate.
open innovation
It is on the outside that the real opportunities to innovate are. In the people who use it, who feel the needs. However, their distance from the inside prevents them or limits their ability to create, to produce.
Open innovation is, in this view, also an illusion. Opening the doors of the factory [business] and bringing the user inside, to innovate based on their aspirations does not work, it is symmetrically and inversely as wrong as thinking that from the inside, from the capacity to produce, it is possible to innovate.
The first step taken, on the path from closed innovation to open innovation, is the construction of methods that enable the exchange between those who were on the outside and those on the inside. Methods based on immersion, which lead those inside to undergo the experiences of those outside, and methods based on focusgroups that bring those outside to the inside are important mechanisms, but still far from the experience of the craftsman. It is not possible to delight a consistent experience from an immersion activity, nor is it possible to build a full understanding of the production potential from a focusgroup action.