Nowadays a lot of things seems to happen that will influence on enterprises and individuals. The economy takes unpredictable turns, and innovation may suffer from capital starvation because more restrictive and careful financial investment policies.
Innovation inevitably comes with risk, and a lot of investors will be much more careful in respect to if and where they place their money. Careful investors may perform a much more thorough investigation of potential investments on beforehand than before.
My guess is that projects that has a solid innovation model, based on Enterprise Web 2.0, will have an advantage. This innovation model should include collaboration from all stakeholders, including its users. What this means to each and every project will vary, and Enterprise Web 2.0 must be adapted to the target organization(s) and individuals and vice versa.
Open Innovation can be seen as Enterprise Web 2.0 in an innovation context. Open Innovation recognizes that it is not affordable or rational that enterprises invents products solely from it's own research. Knowledge is distributed and must be gathered into collaboration.
I think Open Innovation can be taken one step further fully utilizing Web 2.0 software, with Social Media and Wikinomics to enable Mass Collaboration at a large scale. A popular term for this is Crowdsourcing.
Enterprise Web 2.0 connects knowledgeable people in new ways through social media, and collaboration through wikis is far more effective than email. Wikis is there for every interested person to read and contribute, and is not limited to mailing list. Further everyone is informed at the same time, at least all those subscribing to feeds from the wiki.
The community that arises around an idea or project will be a part of the backing capital, that nurtures it with capital, energy and direction. When there are several strong (economical or knowledgable) stakeholders involved, risk is spread.
So how can a software development enterprise start thriving from Open Innovation? Guess there will be no easy answer for that. In general I think it will be good to start in the small, opening up extension points that business partners can be interested in collaborating and provide value added services. Discussions and documentation must be located at a wiki, and people should be able to get acquainted with each other through some social media.
Opening up extension points in a software product, clearly puts some requirements on its architecture. To begin with, explore microformats and authentication solutions like OpenId, then consider if other formats must be invented.
I have established a Google Site, a subsite of my employer Webstep's site, for this subject. Please read more at http://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/
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