The future of open innovation: The future of open innovation is more extensive, more collaborative, and more engaged with a wider variety of participants

Open innovation emerged as a concept about 14 years ago. At its inception, the focus was primarily upon individual companies collaborating with partners in interesting ways. There was the example of Procter & Gamble (P&G) printing text on Pringles chips using an Italian bakery's edible ink and process, or bringing the Swiffer Duster to market via a licensing arrangement with a Japanese company that already had the product in the market in Japan. In the B2B world, IBM was capitalizing on both Linux and Java, using them to advance its IBM Global Services activities. Today, the concept has progressed to include business model innovation and services innovation, in contexts that include multiple collaborations, communities, and entire ecosystems. Fourteen years ago, a Google search on the term "open innovation" would not have yielded any useful responses. Today, that search returns hundreds of millions of responses. In just a decade and a half, open innovation has gone from nowhere to everywhere. It represents a new conceptual framework for understanding industrial innovation.