Last week I attended SDForum’s Open Innovation & Corporate Research Fair in Santa Clara, CA (in Silicon Valley).  For those who don’t know, Open Innovation is collaboration among different entities (i.e., companies, governments, universities, individuals) to develop new ideas/products/services that create value.   Henry Chesbrough of UC-Berkeley coined the phrase and has written several books about it.

Representatives from Nokia, IBM, EMC, HP and PayPal talked about open innovation in their respective companies.  Some interesting details that emerged included:

• 40% of IBM’s revenues are derived from business partners.  (This is not unusual.  For example, at P&G,  35% of new products have elements originating outside the company and 45% of products in development process have externally discovered elements).  Plus, it has been supportive of Linux and the Open Source community
• Nokia is partnering with UC-Berkeley in a project called TrafficWorks that uses GPS in mobile phones to crowdsource actual traffic conditions.  They have found the system can work effectively with as little as  1-2% of cars participating.
• HP does an open global call for projects from universities.  So far, there have been 60 awards to 46 universities in 12 countries.  The company is also part of Open Cirrus, an open cloud-computing research testbed.
• EMC has put a lot of focus on Total Customer Experience and collaborates with universities and select companies on innovation projects.
• PayPal is accelerating its innovation by making it as easy as possible for developers to work with them

If you have been  involved in an open innovation project, what was the experience like for you and/or your company?