Collaborative innovation drives business growth

Innovation is considered as vital factor for business companies to move forward towards modernity and gain competitive advantage. Many business professionals believe that innovation is the fruitful commercialization of unique ideas, including products, services, processes and business models. It is also a critical constituent of economic progression. To represent unique position in global marketplace, companies need to espouse policies of radical innovation.

Collaborative innovation is elaborated as an open innovation strategy that empowers consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers and merchants to build partnership with the intention to generate huge revenues and provide customers with more innovative offerings.  There is a growing evidence that collaborations equip companies to quicken innovation and leads to more competitive market positions.

It is recognized that collaborative innovation enhances business. Collaborative Innovation aids global organizations to resolve critical issues of capacity and capability growth and cost optimization. The major benefit for producers and merchants is sales and profit improvement. Collaborative innovation also improves idea generation and decision making with customer and consumer insight data, provide customers with more innovative offerings, decrease rework, increase speed to market, and improving implementation.

Best practices in collaborative innovation are classified into four fundamental groups:

1.   Developing a Strategy for Collaborative Innovation

2.   Conducting Collaborative Business Planning

3.   Getting Your House in Order

4.   Building Trusted Relationships

A lively example of NASA can be cited here to expound the value of collaborative innovation.  NASA had espoused collaborative innovation tactics to build a mathematical algorithm that can regulate the ideal content of medical kits for NASA’s future manned operations. NASA teamed up with TopCoder, Harvard Business School, and London Business School to obtain innovative software to resolve several issues. Collaboration of coders and software enthusiasts from all over the world helped in cracking many problems.

Gist of this article is that collaborative innovation has district place in accelerating business growth. This type of open innovation is an efficacious process of managing the interaction and partnership of several partners to deliver good solutions within a business environment. Fruitful open innovation partnerships have an ability to appease the customer.