I will start with my experience with open innovation in my previous job. I worked as a Project Manager in Ericssson, in USA and oversea. Ericsson is a Telecommunication company and was a prime leader in mobile communication till 2012.Ericsson business include HW, Services and Managed Services. Ericsson business exists in more than 100 countries and 40% of the world mobile traffic is carried over Ericsson Network. My experience with Ericsson open innovation initiatives started in 2006.I …show more content…
I faced a lot of technical challenges and what saved me in a lot of cases was the Knowledge Sharing community where I can post a question and employees from around the world can answer this question. This community not only helped me in solving any problem but also to get connected with project managers in different places of the world who passed through the same challenges and we shared the lessons learnt and best practices. The Knowledge Sharing community boosted my technical knowledge as well as saved project cost. When I look at this experience from a project view, I see the cost and time saving resulted from getting the help from the community. When I look at it from my own view as an employee, the key outcome was networking, increasing technical knowledge and breaking up the silos and connecting with different resources from different business units. The strategy applied here was technology driver strategy where the company used these communities as a form of its R&D. The recommended solutions from this community was directly feeding the R&D and the product development.
The Third position as contributor to the innovation community, my experience with the knowledge sharing community motivated me to be a more valuable contributor to the company. I participated in an internal open innovation initiative which was encouraging …show more content…
The utility industry is strictly regulated by the government; the company isn’t allowed to do in-house R&D. PG&E relies on third partied to do the R&D. The company would allow the third parties to test their solutions on PG&E network. There is no dedicated budget for R&D. The strategy which the company following to overcome the regulations regarding R&D is market reader and knowledge seeker strategies. The company knows its customer and through different surveys and researches in customer behaviors, the company identifies the customer and market needs. The feed these results to the contracted R&D companies to develop innovative solutions. The company select best solution and put it into test. The company applies market reader strategy towards the customer and the knowledge seeker strategy towards the third party contractors. Government regulation may strop the company from doing its own R&D but it shouldn’t stop it from having its own internal innovation initiative. This course encouraged me to think about being innovative and to start my own innovation initiative within my group. I didn’t see the results yet but I’m very