Applying the paradigm of Open Innovation to enhance early Collaborative Product Potential Analysis

Open Innovation is one of the most recognized business innovations in the last decade. But while the original idea of this paradigm has been to involve external actors throughout the innovation process, industrial practice often interprets Open Innovation as the mere integration of the final customer during the idea generation. This paper introduces Collaborative Product Potential Analysis (cPPA) as a method for innovation management in industrial networks. It implements the ideas of Open Innovation by systematically integrating knowledge of suppliers, customers and service providers in the process of idea evaluation and selection. cPPA gives comprehensive insight into an innovation idea even in the fuzziness of the front end of innovation. An example from the collaborative research project AVALON illustrates how the cPPA method can help to highlight strengths and weaknesses of a product idea early in the innovation process.