Fifth India Innovation Summit '09- Day 2- Session-1

The first session of the next day morning was on - Open Innovation and Co-Innovation. The speakers for this session were:

• S Bhaskaran, Sr Director - Philips Healthcare, Philips Electronics India Ltd.
• Ajay Vasudeva, Head R&D India, Nokia India Pvt. Ltd.

Bhaskar provided an overview of the cycle of innovation and how the trends are moving to open innovation through a series of graphs that reflected the increasing number of patent activities. In his view the reason why Open Innovation is an imperative is owing to:

• No one can have the best know how
• Open innovation increases exponential knowledge
• The information in increases at such a pace that it's impossible to keep up, let along single handedly harness
• Best to collaborate and leverage
• Technology is racing.
• There are mechanisms now available to leverage.

He depicted the innovations to be of various types, including: Closed; Co-Creation: Customers; Open - Anybody; Grassroot – Bottom Up; Democratizing - Masses; Crowd Sourcing; Web to Solicit; Crowd Casting; and Solicit from specific, paid people via the www. Some of the examples being: Innocentive; MiPlaza (Philips); and iPhone Dev Center; among others.

He summed up the talk highlighting on how firms can make Open Innovation work:

• Company policy – state it clearly
• Need top management buy in
• Break the not-invented-here syndrome
• Good to have a grand failure to accelerate acceptance of open innovation
• Dont be too far ahead of time. Open innovation works best when the its current and at the edge and everyone can contribute and take it forward
• Information ubiquity becomes important
• IP Infrastructure -> Should be robust
• There should be sufficient regulatory protection/enablement
• Company infrastructure to protect IP

A very well made presentation.

Ajay started with an overview of R&D activities at Nokia followed by some of the driving principles. These are:

• Consumers are in control. They collect 12 billion data points, analyse and brain storm and figure out solutions. This breaks the market into 13 segments for who devices have to be designed.
• Strong partners and vibrant Ecosystem – containing research fellows. Leverage all this.
• Culture and Values.
• Focus on sustainability (green, eco friendly), and
• Also there is opportunity to take up.

Some of the examples of Open Innovation are Nokia are: forum.nokia.com and store.ovi.com where they get developers and mobile enthusiasts from across the globe to help them develop the next breakthrough. One such innovation is Nokia Life Tools. It is a range of Agriculture, Education and Entertainment services designed especially for the consumers in small towns and rural areas. Another one is MeraNokia which is pre-installed in certain cell phones and offers services around Agriculture, Education, Ringtones and Astrology.

These two talks followed a good round of Q&As