Open Services Innovation - 9780470905746

The father of Open Innovation is back, this time with his most expansive, most generally appealing book yet. Open Innovation described a new paradigm for the management of industrial innovation in the 21st century: Useful industrial knowledge today is widely distributed around the world.  Successful innovating firms must open up, to work with external partners to commercialize internal innovations, and allow unused internal ideas to be taken to market by others externally. The goal of Chesbrough’s forthcoming work Open Services is to demonstrate how the open innovation approach applies to companies both in the service businesses and those that want to be there. 

The book explains how companies must make two crucial shifts: one from products to services; and the other from closed to open innovation. Readers will discover:

• A competitive strategy for today’s services-based economy;  
• The guiding principles and frameworks for changing any business unit, company or industry to experience renewed growth and profits through Open Services and Innovation.

Four new concepts are introduced and described in detail:

1. Service innovation differs from product and technology innovation
   
2. Co-creation: the critical role customers play in services innovation
   
3. How business models must change in order to implement services innovation
   
4. How openness is essential to obtain economies of scale and economies of scope in service innovation.

Chesbrough enlightens his readers by explaining the need to develop a new perspective about business, one that rethinks the business models in a services-based economy. Chesbrough establishes that the future prosperity of economy and the companies within comes from progressive shifts from a manufacturing-based economy to a largely services-based economy, driven by continued innovation. 

Chesbrough provides more than anecdotal material on how we must now view industries less as manufacturers and more as platforms for services.  He leads us to examine industries in different ways, e.g. it is one thing to think of the automobile as a means for transportation, it’s another to think of it as a delivery method for providing transportation services over time.