A couple of weeks ago I What is Open Innovation? in the community, "What is Open Innovation?", now I want to talk a bit about what I think Open Innovation is to me.
I received a few comments when I posted that blog and I'm hoping to address at least one of those comments in this post, however the other two comments I'm going to save for another post. The comment I'm hoping to address in this post was from, Vijay Vijayasankar,
After racking my brain on this - I found no good definition that made sense to me. So I am very eagerly waiting to find out what you come up with eventually. Till such time I will put it away with a tag of "buzz word".
Vijay had a similar thought to me and therefore hopefully the following will help him decide as well. I even partially addressed this in my response to Ignacio in regards to his comment on that first post as well.
In reality this is something of course that has been happening for a very long time - you were thinking along these lines in 2006 as was I and many others; I stated in another comment yes this could be seen as a buzz word but the notion of it and the desire to achieve it is very real and there are very real things happening.
So what is Open Innovation, or rather what is Open Innovation to me? Well for starters yes, I truly believe it is nothing more than a new term to describe things that have been happening for many years now. So why then does my new role excite me and motivate me each day to dig into the trenches? What motivates me to listen to, engage with and interact with individuals all over the world with new and interesting ideas around SAP technologies?
For me it's actually obvious because those questions are the very things that I think Open Innovation is all about, the new and interesting ideas and technologies connected to SAP technology and of course things that can be and maybe will be connected in the near future to our various products and platform. Not to mention the people that are talking about those technologies and how they might be connected to our technology, products and platform.
Those who know me know I'm a geek through and through and I love the enterprise software space and therefore being able to get my fingers into the mix and see and hack around with these various technologies is just part of who I am, in my role in the community I kept myself in the space as much as possible in order to better relate but also because it's what I love to do and now with it being a focus and the community being a place I can share what I learn and find on the way seems to be as perfect a fit as the previous role was.
The ability to work together with others with technology and experiment with and enhance existing technologies is an exciting time and for me is core to the idea of Open Innovation. There are many in the world that see along these lines, in fact one, a friend Vinnie not only blogs about it but is also writing a book (Facebook) all about his thoughts on it.
So that's what Open Innovation, one one level is to me, on the other level is the combining of technologies both those you own (you as a company) with those owned by others in the most acceptable way for both parties to achieve something new, more efficient and more suitable for the task at hand. So I am also very much focused on the Open Source topics within SAP as I was in the past with and the various Scripting Languages and in the month and half or so that I've been on the team I've been under an avalanche of new information around things that happening both within SAP but also out side of SAP.
I will share a lot of this as time allows and when they become available to the community, so stay tuned...
