From Open Innovation to Collective Intelligence

By Martin Duval

Open Innovation is an innovation model based on the development of an open and collaborative culture within organisations and on the mobilisation of all the stakeholders of their ecosystem. Collective intelligence, massive and digital, which engages thousands of contributors in a short time to solve major strategic and societal issues, is the natural extension of open innovation.

How do you develop an innovation culture more collaborative and open within an organisation? Once you develop such a culture, what then is the impact on the key roles of the enterprise and what change management does it require? How does one launch a collective intelligence process, and using what methodologies and tools?

Illustrated with many cases and testimonies from French and international players, this book brings you all the keys to implement an Open Innovation road map and launch an impactful and revolutionary collective intelligence approach for a public body or a private company.

About the Author

Martin Duval is the co-founder of bluenove, a leading technology and consulting firm in collective intelligence and CivicTech based in Paris. Prior to this, he worked in major corporations such as Airbus, Orange, AccorHotels, etc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Duval
• Release date: Jun 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463748138

Book preview

From Open Innovation to

Collective Intelligence

Copyright © 2019 Martin Duval

Published by Martin Duval Publishing at Smashwords

Second edition 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the copyright holder.

The Author has made every effort to trace and acknowledge sources/resources/individuals. In the event that any images/information have been incorrectly attributed or credited, the Author will be pleased to rectify these omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Published by Martin Duval using Reach Publishers’ services,

P O Box 1384, Wandsbeck, South Africa, 3631

Edited by Colleen Figg for Reach Publishers

Cover designed by Reach Publishers

Website: www.reachpublishers.co.za

E-mail: [e-mail]

Translation into English coordinated by Transcentral (Pty) Ltd, under the supervision of Eva Arissani and in collaboration with her team of translators and proofreaders, namely Ms Vivier, Ms Cawthra, Ms Greenwood.

Martin Duval

[e-mail]

Business Strategy

"We build too many walls and not enough bridges."

Isaac Newton

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Aristotle

"The enterprise is a collective intelligence platform."

Joël Rosnay

"There is no greater occupation for men than to bring men together."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Table of Contents

List of Annexures

List of Abbreviations

Preface

The Author

Introduction

Part 1 Open Innovation

1. What is Open Innovation?

2. Why Open Innovation?

3. Open Innovation, for Whom?

4. How to implement Open Innovation?

5. Open Innovation and the various business lines of the company

6. Open Innovation Trends and Prospects

Part 2 Collective Intelligence

7. What is Massive and Digital Collective Intelligence?

8. The Main Principles, Beliefs and Fundamentals of Collective Intelligence

9. How to Implement a Collective Intelligence Approach

10. From Collective Intelligence to Open Leadership

11. Some Major Areas and Use Cases Impacted by Collective Intelligence

Conclusion and Opening

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

List of Annexures

ANNEXURE 1: Fr Gwenjere’s Letter to Beira Bishop Mgr De Resende

ANNEXURE 2: Father Gwenjere’s Testimony at the UN General Assembly

ANNEXURE 3: Mondlane’s Address on ‘Causes of the Difficulties at M. Institute’

ANNEXURE 4: Students who Benefited from Fr Pollet’s Assistance, as for PIDE

List of Abbreviations

Preface

The meeting of Société Générale’s African teams with Martin Duval and bluenove was like the catalyst of an intuition. The intuition that, in a fast-paced and fragmented world, our ability to understand and respond to each other’s needs rests more than ever on listening, respect and curiosity. The intuition that the leader is no longer the one who builds for others, but the one who knows how to assemble the forces of all in order to build better. The intuition that time no longer belongs to pyramid hierarchies, but rather to horizontal and collaborative approaches. The intuition that the best solution does not derive from the one who has the brightest intelligence, but from the one who knows how to make profitable the confrontation of differing points of view, visions and ideas. The intuition that creativity is not born from the capacity to launch new techniques, but from the faculty of using new techniques in the service of a common good. The intuition that it is no longer reproduction and productivity that guarantee success in the promotion of new models but boldness. The intuition that it is in trust that we build a stronger collective.

For the last five years, Société Générale’s Africa Management teams and bluenove have been building a tremendous adventure on these shared intuitions. We first set up a management community from our 18 African subsidiaries: 50 in the first year, 80 in the second, and 150 to date.

Built around an approach of meetings, training and digital collaborative tools, this community now constitutes the backbone of our African system. It stands out as a source of unity in diversity, of dialogue, as a laboratory of innovation, ideas and exchanges; it conveys a great desire for Africa, for the future and for optimism.

However, the projects of this community had to find a place to develop. An open place, a meeting place with innovative ecosystems, a place at the heart of the companies in which we operate, a place of discovery of start-ups in Africa. We therefore created an Innovation LAB in Dakar. This LAB is hosted by Jokkolabs, an incubator present in eight African countries. It is a place that enables confrontation between the needs expressed by the bank’s employees and the abundant world of African start-ups. We multiply the initiatives to give life to this Lab, around Hakhatons, pan-African challenges involving our 18 subsidiaries and more than 250 start-ups from all over the world. A place where new solutions have been built, around the mobile industry, in a method of agile, frugal, and rigorous experimentation and in the mutual respect of what we bring to ourselves. New solutions, which are profoundly changing the way we want to bank in Africa.

What is tremendous about this innovation culture and this co-construction approach is that it always takes us further. It is thus that in 2017, we launched two new initiatives.

The first was to bring together – in a unique partnership, the bank, start-ups and informal economy representatives of different African countries. For the bank, it was an opportunity to better understand the needs of an economy still marginalised by the banking system and to identify the levers to make the bank more accessible, more user-friendly, and more able to meet those needs. For start-ups, it was anchoring the belief that the most sophisticated technical solution will only develop if it meets its use.

For the informal sector operators, it is to measure, even more, the assets that technology and the bank can offer to respond to vital development needs and to provide solutions that we will build with them. Together we form a living community, which is certainly going to grow, around a common goal, which is creating an Africanised bank, anchored both technologically and wonderfully in the practices of the countries.

The second is the great debate: during the reaffirmation at the end of 2017 of the importance of Africa in our development strategy, we launched a four-month-long consultation open to Société Générale’s 11,000 African employees. We asked them to look ahead at our bank to the next ten years on the continent using the bluenove’s collective intelligence platform Assembl. This was designed to enable a citizen debate to co-build a European constitution and was used more recently for a debate on a smart city by the City of Paris. This debate, built around some important questions (Who are we? Who do we want to be tomorrow? What are the paths to achieve this?) is structured around thousands of contributions, discussions and proposals on the platform. These debates are fuelled by convictions, experiences and initiatives at the heart of our system. They anchor us in the practical setting of our clients’ and employees’ daily life. They make it possible to better understand what brings us together – what distinguishes us as well, and in this coming decade, the way in which we must embody our desire for Africa. These contributions will gradually blend into a vision, and this vision into a strategy. They are the root of a collective adventure and cement the feeling that we share a common destiny.

And that will continue, I am certain. We are filled with ideas: around training, support for SMEs, to open ourselves up to the experiments of our clients… freeing speech, fostering collaborative approaches, forcing ourselves to listen in a spirit of humility, expanding the field of initiative, believing in the role and responsibility of everyone in the global structure, daring partnerships and the meeting of worlds, believing in the lifeblood that comes from the field, choosing boldness, working in a laboratory type and co-constructing way; all this self-feeds and engages us all in a spiral of enthusiasm, optimism and success.

New paths that help everyone find meaning and take ownership of a common destiny.

Alexandre Maymat

Director for Africa, the Mediterranean and Overseas, Société Générale

The Author

Martin Duval, Open Innovation and Collective Intelligence

I was fortunate to practice ‘Open Innovation’, much like Mr Jourdain practiced prose without knowing it, since 2001, while this concept – one could say the branch of the discipline that is innovation management – began to appear in the United States. It was in fact by managing the relationships and the partnerships with the innovative start-ups of the Mobile sector and Web 2.0 within the Orange Group between 2001 and 2008 that I discovered the first publications by Professor Henry Chesbrough from Berkeley on this subject. This discovery allowed me to put a definite end to a still-vague concept and to summarise perfectly what seemed to me at the time an obvious and inescapable evolution of the innovation strategy of large groups within an economic context in crisis.

With this conviction, in 2008, I created a consulting company, bluenove, specialising in Open Innovation, which merged with a Canadian start-up in the field of collective intelligence software in 2014. As of 2018, bluenove has a team of approximately 50 consultants and developers based in Paris and has completed more than 300 projects with over 150 clients in all industrial and public sectors.

Since the creation of bluenove, I measured the need to integrate and develop, within the company, special skills in the field of innovation management, of course, but also the facilitation of creativity, digital uses and change management.

Since our merger in 2014, this concept of skills hybridisation has intensified with an ever-stronger and supported belief that open innovation and collective intelligence should merge to serve a new paradigm of performance and leadership for our clients: which is to generate a competitive advantage for the large private and public organisations we serve, through their ability to mobilise the collective intelligence of their ecosystems better than others.

The process of writing my first book, published in 2014, allowed me to refine my discourse on Open Innovation to my colleagues, our clients and partners. This second edition, five years later, formalises more concretely the bridge between Open Innovation and massive and digital collective intelligence with the mad ambition of helping to find, through these practices, methods and technologies, the still unresolved major issues of our companies and modern societies through the emergence of a truly new field.

Acknowledgments to Klaus-Peter Speidel

A special thanks to Klaus who co-wrote the first edition of the book in 2014 with me. Although Klaus has since devoted himself to an academic career and to the field of storytelling, I was keen to retain many of his initial contributions by citing him, in particular, in the Examples sections he had written.

Acknowledgements to Frank Escoubes

I would also like to thank my partner Frank Escoubes, with whom I have the growing pleasure of sharing the co-chairmanship of bluenove since the merger of our two companies in 2014. Frank has inspired me a great deal and also helped write the section on the concept of collective intelligence, the field in which I believe he is one of the most eminent experts.

Introduction

This book could not have been written without some biases and convictions.

As a whole, this book is decidedly practical. When the question of the definition of Open Innovation arises here, it is, above all, with a critical aim. Existing definitions often reflect more the interest of a particular researcher than the operational reality of the approaches of openness and collaboration. The aim will be to clarify some points that are often obscured by the publications that have been flowing since 2003, and to explain the links between OI and concepts and practices that are sometimes associated with it in a non-differentiated way. The first chapters serve as an introduction for those who do not yet have a thorough knowledge of the topic, but also present from the outset my point of view on how to define OI. Two elements are essential to my vision: comparing open organisations to closed organisations seems a cliché to me, and I believe we must think of openness as much internally as externally.

After this essentially descriptive introduction, Chapter 2 ‘Why Open Innovation?’ explains the fundamental reasons that are at the root of the long-term success of the approach, and particularly in the current economic context.

All the stages of the book are interspersed by cases and actual testimonials. Some, like that of GoldCorp or P&G, are historical, traditional and known to insiders. However, most have been specially written for this book, with often the most recent being chosen. Together, they portray an image that I hope completes the subject. In Chapter 3, ‘Open Innovation: for whom?’, the paragraph entitled ‘What is the current status of the large French companies?’ zooms in on the state of the Large Groups/Start-ups relationship in France through the results of the Village by CA and bluenove 2017 barometer.

Then it is important to address a big question: that of the type of business or organisation for which the approach is appropriate. It is not, in fact – perhaps with some exceptions – a question of sector of activity or size, but rather of culture. The role of OI for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is often disregarded and even considered as irrelevant to them, and examples are therefore also given to demonstrate its relevance.

The central part of the first part addresses Open Innovation by the methods that can be implemented, and the players involved. The presentation is structured around a reference framework of eight axes that relate to collaboration with both external and internal players. Again, case studies and testimonials play a vital role and methodological advice emerges therefrom. Chapter 5, which is particularly operational, shows the role of the various traditional players in the company (HR, IT, R&D, etc.) in setting up an Open Innovation approach, what each department can gain and how and when to best involve it.

In Chapter 6, a projection into the attempts to identify the future trends of open innovation and, more broadly, the major management issues still unresolved by the Innovation departments.

In the introduction to the concept of massive and digital collective intelligence in Chapter 7, its methodological and technological dimensions and links to a new generation of metrics to manage human resources and talents within organisations are described. Also discussed are emerging technologies related to participative and deliberative democracy, called Civictech. The example of the Assembl methodology and platform is often repeated because Assembl is at the same time:

– an emblematic and innovative project resulting from a European Commission research programme on the issue of co-constructing a constitution;

– a platform with several million European citizens;

– a technological development in Open Source;

– a consultation tool referenced by the French State.

Finally, Chapter 11 provides several examples of the ability of collective intelligence to change in scale in the way of addressing major societal issues.

The conclusion discusses the emergence of a new form of lobbying on subjects exposed to strong regulatory changes.

Part 1

Open Innovation

Chapter 1

What is Open Innovation?

Executive summary

 It is firstly about aligning with the very concept of innovation. The discovery of the Open Innovation concept background helps to better understand its origin and evolution towards collective intelligence.

 In large organisations, the concept of Open Innovation must cover both the internal ecosystem and the external ecosystem, and must also differentiate itself from other similar concepts and accept its complementarity with certain methods and practices.

Technological, product, incremental, disruptive, service, process, organisation-related, marketing, business model related, participative, managerial, distributed, societal, and even more recently, frugal, are some of the adjectives and concepts that qualify nowadays the term ‘innovation’. Embracing these uses, it is appropriate here to think of innovation in a very broad sense, far beyond mere technical, technological or product innovation: innovation which also concerns the processes, the ways of working, of organising, business models, distribution methods, marketing, etc. Furthermore, an idea, a patent, a concept, an invention, are not yet an innovation: they only become so if they result in a new product or a new service that develops on a very large scale in a new market.

The concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘collaboration’ are at the centre of this book, and conceptual reflections certainly play a certain role, but it is the implementation and the application that matter the most. It is a question of knowing how Open Innovation ceases to be a ‘concept’ and becomes an ‘organizational and cultural reality’ that is central. This chapter aims to shed light on the semantic field around Open Innovation. However, it also gives a preview of the players and the methods and introduces some paradigmatic cases.

Example

Hyperloop: An Open Innovation project from birth!

By publishing its mid-2013 ‘alpha paper’ describing Hyperloop’s operating principles, Elon Musk, the founding CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, unleashed a movement of openness and collaboration that lives up to his promise and he himself incarnates the state of mind of Open Innovation: inventing the fifth method of transport, after the boat, the train, the car and the plane, which are capsules leaving every two minutes carrying about thirty passengers over 1,000 km/h in a tube emptied of air. The speed of the plane married to the frequency of the subway. A unique criterion of evaluation: maximum speed. Close to 25 university teams from around the world competed in August 2017 in Hawthorne, California. Eyes glued to the 1.8-meter-diameter tube running 1.25 kilometres along Jack-Northrop Avenue, next to SpaceX’s headquarters and Tesla’s Design Studio. And in their pod or capsule prototypes, eager to get inside to win the Hyperloop Pod II Contest, organised by SpaceX. 27 teams competed in the first phase at the end of January. The launching of the contest at the Texas A&M University in February 2016 attracted more than 1,000 students, 120 universities and 20 countries. The direct opposite of an R&D project developed in-house. The opening, at full blast, right from the emergence of the crazy idea of its awesome inventor.

Scaling up to international level right from the start.

"The enthusiasm for Hyperloop is part of the renewed interest in transport in the context of the