Albert Meige
In an era where information is
instantly available everywhere on the planet, novelties seem to fade
instantly. The competition is never far away, and in order to survive, there
is no other choice than to innovate faster. In the space of just a few
years, the time required for the design of an airplane has decreased
from ten to seven years, and that for one molecule has gone from
seven to five years.
This acceleration of innovation cycles is
one of the fundamental trends of our economic environment,
and is naturally inseparable from another basic trend:
digitalization. Together, they accelerate the reconfiguration of
traditional value chains.
Companies are seeing that
their products are in danger of being instantly commoditized while at the
same time the very nature of their business models are called into
question. In order to continue differentiating themselves from their
competition, as well as preserve their margins and retain their
clients, they seek to package services into their products, which,
however, requires integrating knowledge sometimes far removed from their
core business area.
At the same time, an exponential inflation of the
volume of knowledge is also taking place. This year, the number
of scientific publications in the world should exceed 5 million and the
number of patents should approach one million. Every business, no matter
its size or sector, has to recognize that most of the knowledge lies outside of
itself, in particular the kind of knowledge that makes it possible to conquer
new territory.
As a direct consequence of
these three factors, and because it's all about taking advantage of external
knowledge in order to innovate faster in a digital context, open innovation
seems to be on the verge of becoming an absolute imperative, as well as a
pleonasm. Indeed, how could innovation not be open? In reality, it
would be more appropriate to speak of open enterprise. In order to innovate
better, more and faster, the entire organization needs to change.
The
frontier has moved from the dimension of space — accessing expertise where it
can be found — to the dimension of time — establishing this capacity in a
durable way. That is why all big companies, haunted by the spectre of
Kodak, are asking themselves how to become as agile as a startup despite having
thousands of employees.
Companies today are answering these challenges by
creating new functions — innovation director, digital director—, even though
the mission at the heart of these functions is of direct concern to the
CEO. Doesn't this point to the fact that survival-minded companies are
transforming themselves? But did Steve Jobs need an innovation director to
accomplish the same thing?
In the end, the innovation imperative
in an open world implies the obsolescence of a 150 old corporate organization
model. In the age of the labour force, companies were factories that
rented interchangeable units of labour by the day. After that came the age
of the machine, where companies aimed to reduce transaction costs by
binding their employees to the tasks assigned to them by an efficient
organization. Today, we enter the age of information, where digitalization
leads to the elimination of transaction costs and thus removes the need for
massive and sophisticated organizations. Today's corporate structures face
the challenge of importing external knowledge, of making good use of it, and of
dynamically reconfiguring themselves, in response to project needs and
environmental shifts.
The Kima Ventures investment
fund could rather well represent the future of enterprise. Every startup
in its portfolio is autonomous and relatively fragile but, on a macroscopic
level, the whole is robust and progresses symbiotically towards a strategic
global perspective. Corporations of independents? SME networks? The
revolution of open innovation shall without doubt create other models of
enterprise that have yet to be invented, but that will almost certainly not
look similar to our existing hierarchical mega-organizations.
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