Nice post by Roland Harwood reflecting on Rob Poynton’s Everything’s An Offer. Rob relates that in improv you can see offers in three groups:
Vague – I need help
Open – I need help with my car it won’t start
Closed – I need help with my car, it won’t start, so bring yours up alongside and we’ll get the jumper cables connected
Rob suggests Open offers are often the best if you want a really creative collaboration. Roland comments:
Relating this back to open innovation, too often we see invitations to collaborate are either too vague or too closed. For examples many open innovation programmes simply ask for ‘ideas’. This is much too vague and will result in the experience such as one very large company I spoke to recently who secured a grand total of 2 ideas in 2 years. On the other hand, there are often calls for extremely specific innovations. Whilst on occasion it is helpful to be very specific about what you are looking for, it can too often stifle the potential solutions by being too detailed in your request.
