We are very happy to announce that we will host a conference (German language) on connecting and managing innovation processes at Zeppelin University at Lake Constance. The keynote speaker will be Frank Piller, accompanied by Elke Baessler (Hilti AG), Herbert Koepplinger (Network of Automotive Excellence) and Alexander Lang (Webasto AG) who will provide detailed insights into the successful usage of open innovation. More Information on the event on our German microsite.

We would be really excited to meet some of our German speaking readers on the event, so please feel free to register.

We are currently working on our thesis’ at university and therefore we are afraid that we don’t have enough time to write frequently on our blog. Please stay tuned with our archives and especially with our best practice list.

Furthermore we want to deliver a summary of our approach of Open Entrepreneurship in the following by refering to several posts in the following, supporting a coherent understanding of our concept that we are going to actualize some time in the near future.

1. Reinventing a Networked Creation of Wealth
2. When Virtual Is Virtuous
3. The Paradox of Openness
4. The Analogy of Digital Networks
5. What Commons Really Have in Common
6. The One and the Many
7. The Entrepreneurial of Open Entrepreneurs
8. Distinguishing Open Entrepreneurs
9. Blowing in the Wind
10. Connecting the Creative Class
11. Paradoxes of Open Entrepreneurship
12. Networking Network Incubators
13. Jamming on Open Entreneurship
14. The Potential of Open Entrepreneurship

Five good reason why it is time to believe again in Santa Claus

1. Integration of customers in the idea generation process

Scientific studies have recently shown: more than 80 percent of all products in market fail. Why should this actually be different with presents like the numerous attempts for exchange in big stores and the extensive offers on Ebay after Christmas impressively show? Wish lists are therefore an ingenious invention of Santa for making a present of something the presentee really has a use for. The acceptance of presents is thereby maximized by the same value as the exchange rate is minimized to the satisfaction of all people involved. And for all of those who already possess anything or are perfectly happy, Social Commerce offers the opportunity to receive a gift again.

2. Reduction of the in-house services by integration of agents

Who still does anything self today? Not only the large management consultancies, but also Santa Claus has long ago realized that thanks to globalization he can cost-efficiently outsource the whole process meanwhile. The more so because he has identified lead users, preferably parents, who gladly and first of all freely of charge take over these crowdsourced tasks in order to bring a joyful Christmas to their children. But even commercial providers have realized which market potential exists for professional Santas for instance in stores or shopping malls and since then they are successfully participating in the franchising-concept of Santa Claus.

3. Massive reduction of distribution costs by decentralization

Regarding the running costs incurring by the all-year maintenance of a logistics infrastructure only used at one day a year, the huge potential for savings becomes clear. The strategic decision of Santa to do without the maintenance of a sleigh and reindeers opens new potential for a decentralized organization of his channels of distribution. Presents are therefore the most time only delivered just-in-time by courier services, sparing Santa not only high storage costs, but also the burdensome way through sooted chimneys with a wealthy belly.

4. Outsourcing of all marketing activities

The cleverest decision of Santa Claus though was to have his whole marketing organized externally – by no less a figure than: Coca Cola. How else should the world have had found out that Santa is a corpulent, white-haired beard bearer with a red jelly bag cap? Especially through viral marketing activities like reading out loud or singing Christmas songs this message was spread to such an extent that meanwhile not any Christmas merchandising article can escape from the produced branding and every child in the whole world should have quite an exact idea of Santa’s appearance and his character.

5. Reduction of transaction costs by virtual organization

Writing to Santa Clause was practically always possible. Though, one got to consider the gigantic costs for sending a letter to the North Pole and the desired present back. No wonder therefore that Santa was one of the pioneers of networking worldwide in the course of a virtual organization. At northpole.com every small and big child can inform oneself about the organization of Santa Claus or write him an e-mail.

Santa Claus has so adjusted his business model very successfully on Open Innovation and has perfected creation of wealth in networks as an entrepreneur. Thereby he has some decisive comparative advantages in regard to other present service providers as the Easter Bunny for instance. This will as well ensure market shares in the future for Santa as a quasi-monopolist in Christmas businesses and will provide him keeping a high market value. The only question that now arises is, what actually does Santa Claus at Christmas time? – Damn right: holidays!

So therefore, not seeing him is a far cry from saying that he does not exist which is no prove at all! Therefore it is actually time to believe again in Santa Claus. What a dark world would that be, if there were no wishes, dreams and hope anymore? What a world would that be, if Santa Claus did not exist? ; -)

With this in mind, we wish all readers a merry Christmas & all the best for 2008!

B. Jospeh Pine II hold a very interesting keynote speech at the World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization 2007 at Stata Center, MIT Boston about the topic “The Past, Present, and Future of Mass Customization”. We want to provide some outtakes out of this very interesting opening keynote because the topic correlates in very many ways as an addition to the interactive creation of value shown by Reichwald and Piller as well as a guideline for entrepreneurship in the area of individualizing mass products.

B. Joseph Pine II is the author of "Mass Customization" and "The Experience Economy".

Here the following parts of the keynote video:

Happy Birthday! Openeur has grown out of babyhood and is celebrating its first birthday. It is exactly one year now that we started this blog with our Mission Statement in order to deal with conneting Open Innovation and Entrepreneurship starting from the opening of the innovation process.

Over the course of this, we could develop our own approach of Open Entrepreneurship in regard to that we want to refer to several posts in the following, supporting a coherent understanding of our concept.

1. Reinventing a Networked Creation of Wealth
2. When Virtual Is Virtuous
3. The Paradox of Openness
4. The Analogy of Digital Networks
5. What Commons Really Have in Common
6. The One and the Many
7. The Entrepreneurial of Open Entrepreneurs
8. Distinguishing Open Entrepreneurs
9. Blowing in the Wind
10. Connecting the Creative Class
11. Paradoxes of Open Entrepreneurship
12. Networking Network Incubators
13. Jamming on Open Entreneurship
14. The Potential of Open Entrepreneurship

Starting from this, we looked for examples from practice over the last few months supporting our approach and could attend some very inspiring conferences like MCPC 2007 at the MIT in Cambridge/Boston. Through the work on the topic, we got the opportunity to functionally discuss with very many very interesting people as well as becoming friends with some of them. Here and now, we want thank again all our conversational partners for their sugestions and support. We should definite stay in dialogue!

In next few weeks and months, we will actualize our approach of Open Entrepreneurship by means of the insights we found in the last time and will continue to further develop it together with all partners of Openeur. We are looking forward to another year with Openeur!

Eric von Hippel recently hold a terrific keynote speech at the MCPC2007 at MIT about the topic User Innovation, in which he described the economic paradigm of highly efficient user-communities innovating collaboratively with the help of digital toolkits. Or in his own words:

“User have innovated historically - but the collaborative design has become so efficient that it is going to drive out manufacturer based design in certain areas.”

As a result, innovations are getting cheaper and topics like Intellectual Property or patenting will loose their importance when it comes to innovation. The reason for this is that users will collaboratively develop innovations and reveal them to others for free even if the manufacturer does not provide a toolkit. To illustrate this, von Hippel referred to examples in the sports and software industry where users built their own toolkits for interaction because of the absence of any corporate solution. Von Hippel directly adressed the manufacturers in the audience:

“No one ins preventing you from patenting things. But the point is that you are competing with people who will freely reveal. Your secret is basically hostage to the person who has least to loose.”

So, following Eric von Hippel’s thoughts, manufacturers have no choice, but to harness the enormous potential lying outside the boundaries of their organizations by developing toolkits and interfaces for user innovation. Otherwise they have to fight against their most loyal customers and loose a competitive advantage in the long run - because other competitors will collaborate with their lead users. Even companies that are successful today should keep in mind that there is always someone out there having least to loose.

Here you can watch the complete keynote speak:

Eric von Hippel MCPC2007 MIT Boston Part1

Eric von Hippel MCPC2007 MIT Boston Part2

Eric von Hippel MCPC2007 MIT Boston Part3

Eric von Hippel MCPC2007 MIT Boston Part4

The Open Innovation company Fellowforce has started a Tagline Challenge opening up the decision on its tagline to the contributions of its users. They were offered a reward for the best tagline that should make it on the Fellowforce frontpage. We recently had a very interesting talk with Ruben Robert, CEO and founder of Fellowforce, at the MCPC 2007 at MIT in Boston where we promised him to spend some time thinking about his Tagline Challenge and how our contribution to it could look like.

We finally seized the idea behind Fellowforce itself and invited our fellow students at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany, to join us in finding the perfect tagline for Fellowforce. Almost exactly as Fellowforce does in regard to the innovation community worldwide over the web, we thereby crowdsourced the Tagline Challenge into our university: we organized a digital ideation pitch inside our university’s intranet and we were absolutely astonished about the lots of positive reactions Fellowforce received. While our fellow students were sending more and more brilliant suggestions - we got increasingly into trouble about the decision which one of those we should actually choose as the perfect tagline for handing in to the Tagline Challenge.

We finally realized that there probably is no single tagline representing everything that is at the core of the idea of Fellowforce. There were lots of very good suggestions for a tagline among our students’ contributions, like there are already some very good ones inside the pitch on the website, but none is meeting all the rich expectations people have regarding Fellowforce. All people we spoke to, highly acknowledged the great potential Fellowforce holds in their opinion for shaping the future, determining how we will deal with ideas and opening up innovation in general. But on the other hand, we were surprised about the lots of different perspectives they had on Fellowforce and about the diversity of their hopes and expectations.

We therefore have realized that the only tagline that is actually possible for Fellowforce is emerging out of all those voices. It lies in the force of the diversity of all of its users, in the way they interpret Fellowforce and will continue to constantly reinvent it. Only combined alltogether, they really hold the idea that is at the inner core of what Fellowforce is all about - inspiring great people!

This is the reason why we want to suggest not to fix a single tagline, Fellowforce should solely stand for in the future, but to leave what Fellowforce is and will be all about to the thoughts of its fellows. And therefore, it is all their voices what should be represented in Fellowforce’s tagline. As finding a tagline for Fellowforce should be a continous challenge, our proposal is to give its tagline back to its users, as it should constantly rotate over a specific period of time representing all the people that stand behind Fellowforce.

As Fellowforce has found new supporters for thinking in a new and revolutional way about ideas and innovation among our fellow students, we are sure the company will continue to find fellows fascinated about the idea of collectively contributing to Fellowforce shaping the ideas of the world. They just got to listen on their voices. Here are the ones we were happily able to record among our fellow students:

“fellowforce - Inspriring People, Inspiring Innovations”

“fellowforce - Breaking Barriers”

“fellowforce - Sourcing the Wisdom of the Crowds”

“fellowforce - The Idea Highway”

“fellowforce - Rewarding the World’s Ideas”

“fellowforce - Start. Right.. Here…”

“fellowforce - The Force of Innovation”

“fellowforce - Impeccable Innovations”

“fellowforce - The Brain Pool of Solutions”

“fellowforce - Passionnovation”

“fellowforce - Collective Business Enabler”

“fellowforce - Longing for Changes”

“fellowforce - Enlivening Innovations”

“fellowforce - The Playground of the Creative Class”

“fellowforce - Solutions Emerging”

“fellowforce - Enabling Innovations”

“fellowforce - Ideas Making a Difference”

“fellowforce - Utilizing the Brains of the World”

“fellowforce - Challenging People”

“fellowforce - Crowdsolutioning”

“fellowforce - Innovation Zeitgeist”

“fellowforce - The Best Way to Protect Ideas, is to Realize them.”

“fellowforce - Ideas Creating Value”

“fellowforce - Bringing Ideas to Life”

This Friday, we are travelling to Boston/MA for the MCPC 2007 World Conference of Mass Customization and Personalization which is the primary event in this domain. Bridging between academic research and management practice, the conference aims to provide an interactive platform to learn about strategies and to discuss the latest technologies and enablers. We will be visiting the academic part at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from October 7-10 2007, with an interdisciplinary focus on the new advancements in the field. The second part, we won’t take part in anymore, will take place at HEC Business School in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in the form of a business seminar.

The conference is jointly organized by MIT Media Lab, MIT Design Lab, RWTH Aachen University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and HEC Montréal Business School (École des Hautes Études Commerciales). The conference shall bring together different voices and thinking on the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. The interdisciplinary approach comprises the perspectives of management and economics, engineering, design and information technology from an academic as well as a practitioners’ perspective. The MCPC will become the largest event in the field of mass customization and personalization, with more than 150 keynotes, presentations, panels etc. on the topic. Further information is provided by Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen, who holds the function of Program Chair of the conference.

We are looking forward to meet many interesting people there, we would be glad to have lots of inspiring talks with. Hopefully, we will be also able to speak to some people at MIT Media Lab. If someone of our readers is visiting the conference as well, just give us a note and we would be glad meeting you there for discussion and social exchange.

Around one month later than previously announced, crowdspirit went closed beta. The result is from the first point of view relatively sobering. In the following a short description of the functions so far.

User present their product ideas - others rate and comment them - that’s it for the most part. All further process steps like funding and product development are not yet working. A market place much similiar to the concept of CambrianHouse was added a few days ago. In everything offered so far, Spigit is much more developed. The question arises what the founders of Crowdspirit have done for the last half year since they announced the concept of the platform. Not a bulletin board more for ideas, the world doesn’t need necessarily.

We’ll see what they’ll make out of it. The beta tag awakens hope and hopefully we’ll get a promising user generated product and maybe even the Facebook-Phone.

The Open Innovation Community fellowforce, just announced the launch of a great widget/toolkit to enable customer and leaduser integration for companies of all sizes:

The ‘Innovate Us’ button is like a ‘Digg-this’ application for innovation, empowering and encouraging consumers to submit ideas to company controlled (Fellowforce enabled) innovation boxes. “We prefer to call them Innovation Boxes because consumer participation is more than just a feedback tool”, adds Crites, “it’s a driver for innovation. And for companies, this is like having a souped-up RSS aggregator to manage idea feeds.”

The basic ‘Innovate Us’ button is free of charge and takes just minutes to install. Companies can upgrade for full facilitation, customization and complete open innovation box solutions. With basic or premium, companies can easily manage ideas from submission to implementation. Consumers can see status reports on their submissions, so the process is transparent between parties. And soon, Fellowforce will launch an Innovation Forum, giving companies the option to take ‘Innovate Us’ ideas into the open for feedback from Fellows. (via prweb.com)

With this solution, fellowforce provides various ways (idea challenges, suggestion-boxes for specific product improvements) to integrate leaduser and customers even for small companies with minimal R&D budgets.  This could be an important step to democratize the innovation process.