Using functional approach to increase effectiveness of open innovation in chemical engineering

• The advantages and challenges of open innovation (OI).
• The focus is on the specific challenge of OI – how to properly formulate innovation problem for OI.
• Functional approach and its advantages.
• How functional approach can help properly formulate problems in the context of OI.
• An illustrative case study from chemical engineering.

Open innovation has been widely discussed ever since P&G publicly pronounced that “Open innovation is a way for companies to avoid the stale, repetitive thinking that can happen when employees are accustomed to their internal ways of solving problems”. The goal of open innovation is to connect innovation problem to the best existing technical solution to this problem that can be found outside of company's R&D. The general concept of open innovation has been widely accepted and practiced. However, in practice, open innovation frequently works inefficiently because problem at the input is not formulated properly or is a wrong problem to be solved. The objective of this article is to discuss this challenge of open innovation and demonstrate – through the prism of chemical engineering – how one of the main TRIZ tools, functional approach, can increase the effectiveness of open innovation.