The role of Trust in Collaboration & Open innovation

This research from Cisco & the EIU highlighted a significant challenge we face in moving from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ innovation models i.e. linear, proprietary and internally-driven (typically by our own R&D) to collaborative (with suppliers, partners and increasingly customers). As the research suggests, although we talk about collaborating today in fact most collaboration is no more than communicating to coordinate activities or cooperating across departmental boundaries to solve problems, creating no new significant insights or value.

If encouraged, collaboration can be a significant multiplier with each player bringing the sum of their knowledge and the value of this generating new insights impossible to gain via classic problem-solution behaviour; the challenge is to move the operator from addition to multiplication where 3+3 = 6 becomes 3x3 = 9, a 50% improvement.

A good example from my experience is NPD (New Product Development), a process designed to create new value, but often lacking the depth of collaboration necessary to achieve it. Too often each party is ensconced in its organisational, linguistic an cultural corner defending its position and without any real intention to step into the new space necessary to generate something new, compelling, different or with a clear customer value proposition.

This Industry Week article suggests that we are going to see a step increase in collaborative activities, including SME's, right across the value chain creating even more pressure to address the trust deficiency.

So What?

If collaboration is a struggle today, then how much more of an issue is going to be in an open innovation culture? Maybe we need to focus on and solve the internal trust issue that sits behind ineffective internal collaboration before we can progress to more demanding external ones? How many organisations have even considered this as an issue, especially in the context of innovation, or make a serious attempt to build the internal cultural, linguistic and organisational bridges necessary? Few that I know.

The way we manage a business, the metrics and rewards we use to influence behaviour sit at the heart of this and without a better understanding of their role in encouraging or limiting meaningful collaboration and the achievement of our innovation goals our innovation gap is going to grow. Yet another sign that it is time to “stop hunting and start farming lightning!”

Trust equation image courtesy of http://www.designinglife.com/.