Many reasons have been given as to how technology can help businesses evolve. Cloud computing will do wonders for your IT costs and your ability to scale your business. Social media will provide a whole new way to connect with your customers. Software service platforms such as Salesforce.com will help you run an organized and structured business at no up-front cost. Shopify.com will allow you to create an e-commerce site at the fraction of the cost it would normally cost. Dropbox, Evernote as well as other great productivity apps out there will help organisation and teams stay in sync.
This is all fine and dandy, but one thing that I personally feel people are missing out on is how technology can help a business innovate. More precisely, how today's technology concepts can help businesses take advantage of the principles of open innovation. The term that Henry Chesbrough coined to promote more than a decade ago, has now - in certain industries - reached another level due to technological advancements.
Open innovation - defined herein as the ability for businesses to include third parties to entitle their innovation process - looks great on paper, but has always been really difficult to implement in the past. Looking back five years ago at large corporations of enterprises - they have been used to working with vast project teams on big, closed infrastructure platforms, making it difficult for third parties to contribute. In the case of a smaller businesses - they typically wouldn't have any technological foundation.
But modern technologies are changing this.
Today, larger corporations can take advantage of app-universes, open APIs and external developer ecosystems to benefit from open innovation "out of the box". This has happened in music, in CRM, in mobile technology and even in financial trading.
Smaller corporations can now take advantage of freelance sites such as oDesk or e-lancer to quickly find resources that they would otherwise not have been able to find, these in turn help the firm with custom innovations.
Everybody is moving towards a more collaborative and open world that allows businesses to innovative without having to re-invent the wheel.
Follow Jannick Malling on Twitter: www.twitter.com/malling
I can nod along to the challenges/problems you mention. In my experience it starts with designing internal processes so that they encourage work with external contributors. I've seen a number of times the concept of open innovation "forced" top-down by management without realizing that it's a bigger change that require new processes and structures.
And in most cases - before all this - it starts with a mindset change and the acceptance that you are your internal teams can't be the best at everything at once.
On the PM tool - for years I were missing a good PM tool that could incorporate this. I still haven't come across that perfect tool, but I feel like it's getting there. There's definitely a trend in PM and team-productivity apps who are focusing on opening up to support work and collaborate with external entities (podio, attask, Force.com). I'm looking forward to following those developments and I'm sure it will only be easier to manage open innovation projects going forward.
You cannot assume that it should run exactly like an internal project. Much of the project management approaches and artifacts, like enterprise collaboration systems simply don't work for open innovation projects.
Today's technology plus the realization that open innovation has its own challenges can certainly elevate a company's level of innovation.
I am sure I am in the minority, but I really would appreciate some specificity from Mr. Malling and any and all others who want to champion 'innovation' rather than simply tossing out a catch-phrase.