Open Innovation + Rapid Incubation = Power

Recently, I have read several interesting articles on how companies develop new projects based on rapid incubation or fast prototyping practices.

Anthony Townsend, Director of Technology Development at the Institute for the Future wrote about rapid incubation and lightweight innovation models in this article, Moving Beyond Open Innovation.

I agree with Townsend that the approaches he touches upon seem to work best for smaller web or software-based companies, but the potential is intriguing for almost any kind of company.

In the article, What Start-Ups Can Teach Big Companies, Steve Lohr looks into the concept of “lean start-ups”. He describes this as:

“The lean start-up model exploits the inexpensive, nimble technologies of open-source software and the Web to accelerate the pace of testing new ideas, finding customers and learning from mistakes, through constant trial and error.”

Companies will encounter many challenges in order to make these approaches work (Townsend lists several in his article), but the combination of rapid incubation / fast prototyping and open innovation can deliver results that makes it worthwhile looking further into this.

I believe there are serious advantages up for grabs for those companies that succeed with this. Thus, I will definitely follow this further and I would appreciate hearing about cases on this topic that could be worth writing about.

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.