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A friend of mine, an innovation consultant, likes to joke: “Innovation is simple…but not easy.”

The same can be said about open innovation too. Prof. Henry Chesbrough, who introduced the concept of open innovation in his now-classic 2003 book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, defined it as using external sources of knowledge and expertise to advance internal R&D. What can be simpler than that?

And yet, the adoption of open innovation has been far from seamless. Open innovation might look simple…but it’s not easy. Firms attempting to incorporate the open innovation “component” into their corporate innovation strategy face numerous barriers — and a recent excellent article by Justyna Dabrowska and co-workers describes some of them.

Of course, many of these barriers are endemic to each firm (remember Leo Tolstoy’s “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?), but some barriers are quite ubiquitous. In this piece, I’d like to review — based on my own advisory experience — four common barriers to the adoption of open innovation and possible approaches to overcoming them.

Treating open innovation as a “special” type of innovation

There is a reason why innovation isn’t easy.

Firms are obsessed with execution. Predictability of outcomes and the precise match between planned and achieved results are the metrics against which most firms measure their performance and performance of their employees.

Innovation is different. By its very nature, it’s highly unpredictable and relies on constant experimentation, with many experiments ending up in no more than a useful learning (as a matter of principle, I refuse to call this “failure”). The unpredictability of outcomes makes innovation difficult to manage, especially when firms try to move their innovation targets beyond incremental improvements of existing products.

Open innovation adds a twist to this complexity by increasing the level of uncertainty because now, you need to innovate with “strangers.” This fear of losing control over the innovation process forces firms to slow the adoption of bona fide open innovation tools like crowdsourcing and rely more on interaction with a narrow circle of tested suppliers and business partners.

To overcome this barrier, open innovation should be closely aligned with the overall corporate innovation strategy. As I argued in my previous article, we have to consider open innovation as part of a single “innovation body.” While one side of this body, internal innovation, represents the innovation potential of the firm’s employees, the other side, open innovation, reaches out to the diverse pools of external talent.

In practical terms, in firms that have just started using open innovation tools, the open innovation team should reside within a larger corporate innovation unit. As the open innovation programs mature, this team will grow and, at some point, may become a unit on its own. But starting with a separate open innovation team from the very beginning is likely to set it up for failure. (I know, I used to work for an organization that did just that.)

Overcoming the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome

As it happens with the adoption of any new paradigm, successful adoption of open innovation requires cultural change — and cultural change isn’t something that comes easy (or simple) to any firm.

A cultural problem most often associated with the adoption of open innovation is so-called Not-Invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome, a rejection, by internal teams, of ideas and solutions that did not originate within the firm.

(We have to realize that the NIH Syndrome manifests not only as a rejection of external knowledge and expertise but also as resistance to intra-company collaboration, when individual units are often reluctant to share their findings with others. I’m not even sure that the NIH Syndrome is more acute when “external” knowledge and expertise are involved, as I saw — and more than just on one occasion — corporate teams more willing to accept solutions from “outside” than from the people/teams residing in the next cubicle.)

There are no simple ways to overcome the NIH Syndrome, and it takes time. Firms should start promoting a cultural shift from problem-solving to solution-finding. This approach postulates that employees are ultimately responsible for the project outcome. How this outcome is to be achieved — by solving the problem internally or by finding a suitable external solution — is of secondary consideration. What is important is how fast this outcome has been achieved and at which cost.

To this end, I strongly recommend reading the excellent article by Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA, describing how the NIH Syndrome was dealt with at the Space Life Science Directorate at NASA.

Mishandling Open Innovation Tools

Adding to the adoption problems is a widespread confusion over available open innovation tools. Sure, some open innovation techniques, such as crowdsourcing, are not intuitive and need training and experience to use. But others, such as working with customers, suppliers, and partners is something that many firms are quite familiar with.

Unfortunately, what is missing is a clear understanding that each specific open innovation tool is only good when applied to a matching innovation task. Some tasks are better performed using tools from a “co-creation” basket, others require crowdsourcing, yet some may be achieved only with engaging startups.

It falls on academics, business writers, and innovation practitioners to educate innovation teams on the classification of open innovation tools and good practices to use them.

Fear of Revealing “Secrets” and IP Concerns

A surprisingly common and persistent fear when adopting open innovation is the possibility of revealing proprietary information to competitors. You can often hear: “What will happen if we include some sensitive data into our open innovation brief? We cannot control who will read it.”

Or: “If we launch this open innovation initiative, our competitors will immediately know our strategy and our direction.” Perhaps, but aren’t your competitors already aware of what your strategy and your direction are?

These concerns, while real, are often overblown. In the era of digital transformation, the pace of innovation is increasing, and going “open” helps firms sustain this pace by shortening time to market and reducing R&D costs. These days, competition is won or lost on being able to over innovate your competitors, not trying to keep them in the dark. A good example of this approach was shown by Tesla in 2014 when it announced it was opening to anyone its portfolio of patents related to electric car technology. Explaining the move, Elon Musk wrote that Tesla would compete and win relying not on secrecy but on the talent of its engineers.

Besides, techniques exist to write an open innovation brief in such a way that the identity of the firm that sponsors it will be hidden. Moreover, very often, it is possible to write a problem statement without even revealing the technical application behind the problem.

Another concern is so-called “IP contamination,” a fear that solutions coming from outside will “contaminate” IP generated within the firm. Sure, this is a real concern, but again, techniques exist (the “need-to-know” distribution of external information, using “IP-buffer” intermediaries, etc.) that can deal with this issue.

Indeed, open innovation is not easy. But it can be learned, and the benefits of mastering this tool will soon pay for the effort.