ABSTRACT
Most innovation, new products, new services, and new process innovations, are not new to the world. Radical innovations, which require an entire new underlying science to execute are rare—perhaps only one in 20 new products, for example, are new to the world. Open innovation professes to be a new way to look at the creative world, but name any example of an open innovation method—even crowd sourcing—has centuries of predecessors, as we will see later. So part of the purpose of this Chapter is to set the record straight on the way we frame this subject. Why does it matter? The management of incremental improvement or what already is offered for sale and purchased or used by customers is quite different than the management of breakthrough, new-to-the-world innovation.
