At its heart, innovation requires ‘newness’, and it is hard to derive newness from old resources. In order to expand your horizons and engage in out of the box thinking, you may need to expand your resources.
Within an organization, there are three levels of collaboration. The first is the internal level, where individuals or departments work together toward a certain goal. The second level of collaboration is the network level, which involves collaboration with supply chains, partners and other relationships that have been developed over time.
If your company is trying to innovate and is only working within these two levels, your results are likely to be limited. While internally, you may have a few thousand resources, and your networks may contain a few thousand more, these two levels barely scratch the surface of what is really out there.
At inno360, we call the entirety of what is really out there the ‘white space’. This ‘white space’ is also sometimes referred to as the global brain and is the third level of collaboration available to an organization.
The white space essentially includes anything related to your innovation project that you do not know or do not have access to currently—including global patents, deep web, literature resources, academic research libraries, etc. Being able to access information in the white space for a particular area increases your innovation capacity exponentially.
Access to the white space gives you greater confidence that you know what is out there in terms of information, IP, expertise and technology. This allows you to see your ‘innovation landscape’, which will help you to make better decisions more quickly throughout your innovation process. For instance, in addition to internal experts and experts within your existing networks, access to the white space means that you have access to experts at other companies, universities and more. Instead of guessing who might be the best person to collaborate with on a given project between just a few, the white space brings in everyone and shows you the work they have done. Then you are able to pick the best of the best.
This diagram shows the value of access to the white space and how increased innovation capacity then leads to further business advantages:
The inno360 platform was designed in conjunction with some of the world’s leading innovators (hotlink to “our clients”) to give organizations access to this ‘white space’ in their innovation process. Going far beyond a normal Google or database search, the inno360 platform’s search capability does a semantic search of extensive resources, providing nearly exhaustive results.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.