In search of ideas to ride the digital revolution

“Disruptive innovation”, the neologism created by professor Clayton Christensen, is the only strategic anchor for riding the digital revolution rather than submitting to it. In a highly competitive context that is under pressure from constant and continual digital transformation, turning to external sources to inject new life into the company can lead to innovation, or even better, to open innovation, a paradigm coined by the American economist, Henry Chesbrough, an invitation to let new stimuli and innovative input from the outside flow into the company.

Opening up to the outside in order to grow and adapt to external transformations has become an imperative. Getting started is always the most difficult stage but deciding to open the company doors and let exogenous forces contaminate the organization is the breakthrough required for moving towards authentic open innovation. According to data from the Open Innovation Observatory, more and more companies, including SMEs, are choosing to entrust in external partners to produce explosive ideas deserving of a 4.0 market.

There is a wide ecosystem of players on which to draw in order to improve: universities and research centres (chosen by 35% of companies), the start-up world (favoured by 20% of companies) as well as call4ideas (11%), competitions for gathering innovative ideas to support and integrate into companies, or hackathons (9%), digital marathons during which developers provide authentic innovative solution concentrates for enterprises.

Whatever the choice, as long as there is effective exchange and osmosis between the company and its external partners, and innovative ideas to integrate into the industrial mechanisms catch on, what is fundamental is that the external subjects are willing to intermix with governance and company logics and that the company is really involved dialectically in the process and prepared to incubate and pump fresh air into new innovation seeds, accepting the disruptive impact.