Over the past couple months, I've criticized Mandarins, Overly Wise Men, and Hubris. A comment was recently posted regarding how to find enablers -- those rare (but not extinct nor stillborn) executives that can be your partner in Open Innovation. For no other reason than the fact I love to define words and create catchy blog post titles, I'm going to call these folks the Mensches of Open Innovation rather than enablers.
Well, OK, there is another reason I'm going to use that term. A mensch is good and decent person. Calling someone a "mensch" is a very high compliment. And if we're talking about those types of people that embrace Open Innovation, and are good and decent people that help you and care about you, they deserve a higher compliment than just "enablers" or "pathfinders" or something that is close, but not really all the way there...
How do you find these Mensches of Open Innovation? Network, network, network. Digital/online networks, personal relationship capital, leveraging friends and peers for introductions, the whole shebang. Open Innovation is still at its very early stages. Most companies are still trying to figure out what it means and how to staff for it. Few companies have any experience with it. Many companies are disguising M&A transactions or vendor/supply agreements as Open Innovation since it has more PR buzz.
We've basically pursued a dual outside/in and an inside/out strategy in building the EIP network and finding our mensches. We've told our story and our model to literally thousands of people. Sometimes we know the company we're trying to get into, but don't know the people there. So we network, network, network for someone who has a similar mindset & passion for innovation and we work our way in. This is our "outside/in" strategy. Other times we don't exactly know where we need to ultimately end up. We have a problem (or an opportunity), but it's not obvious what company is best suited to help us solve it. In that case, we go to folks in our network and lay out the situation and network, network, network into new people and new companies that can help us with that particular situation. This is our "inside/out" strategy.
When you're in the early days of a new industry, it's all about the people. Kindred souls and kindred minds. Shared visions of what is possible and shared desire to take some risk exploring something together without always knowing how it will shake out (be that money flows, roles, or whatever). Finding the Mensches of Open Innovation is not easy, but neither is it hard given the ambient findability that exists online and through leveraging networks.
And, at the risk of stating the obvious, finding the Mensches of Open Innovation requires being one yourself. Give first, help others, connect dots with no clear payback or vig for you; it will come back around. Mensches are there for other mensches.
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