A glimpse into the cultural foundations of open innovation

Learning the art of conversation

The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you. De La Bruyère (1885 [1688]: 109)

From serendipity – a word coined by the historian, man of letters and Whig politician Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and illustrated in all its historical course in Merton and Barber’s (2004) Travels and Adventures of Serendipity – to the ‘controlled sloppiness’ advocated by microbiologist and Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria (1912–1991; Luria, 1955), open innovation can provide useful insights into how to find interesting things and reap unexpected benefits while searching for something completely different and to develop an awareness that the process of innovation cannot be minutely planned, and that elusiveness and impalpability are part and parcel of it. To this end, the instigators of open innovation have much to learn from the art of conversation that flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, with serendipitous salon discussions that effected the verbal face-to-face transference of tacit, uncodified knowledge.

Open innovation culture

O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house! [William Shakespeare, As You Like It, III, iii]

‘The totality of the space outside the borders of the world is infinite’, wrote Lucretius (50 B.C.E.) in Book Two of On the Nature of Things. Similarly, outside the boundaries of our culture, the open innovation space is infinite. The above quip by Shakespeare’s jester Touchstone in As You Like It may prompt us to reflect that culture – of which knowledge is a component along with language, beliefs, customs, practices, codes of conduct and institutions – is the enabler of innovation processes, especially in the open innovation mode. If the cultural norm is unhealthy, knowledge is affected. In turn, a knowledge malaise has negative repercussions on culture. Such repercussions are ‘sandbanks’ in the shallow waters of the convergent thinking that are not navigable by entrepreneurship (unconventional thinking). Instead, they are navigated by managerial thinking with its focus on codified and mandatory practices – such as business plans, financial projections and the guarding of innovation in the coffer of intellectual property protection.

It is the nonlinear flow of divergent thinking that gives rise to new ideas such as those featuring in the open innovation framework, where the entrepreneurial process – that is, the process of finding solutions to existing problems or of recognizing opportunities to be exploited on an entrepreneurial scale through the sharing and exchange of ideas, even with potential rivals – finds ample space for action. The culture of open innovation does not sacrifice such a process on the altar of managing existing activities with proven products and services. Nor is it subjugated by the power of senior corporate bureaucrats, who play only at the table of corporate business while neglecting that of entrepreneurship.

‘Renaissance Man’: Forerunner of the open innovation culture

The modern origins of open innovation culture can be traced back to the age of change that we call the Renaissance, with those 15th-century geographical discoveries that opened up the horizon beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ and the emergence of the bottega (workshop). Those discoveries demonstrated that it was always possible to move the horizon forward and so to communicate with populations and cultures different from our own.

The Renaissance bottega, the ancestor of today’s innovative co-working spaces, was an open culture crucible in which master artists were committed to teaching new artists, talents were nurtured, new techniques were developed and new artistic forms came to light, with artists not only competing among themselves but also working together. There painters, sculptors and other artists met each other, and worked with architects, mathematicians, engineers, anatomists and other scientists – and rich merchants who were their patrons. All gave form and life to Renaissance open communities, generating aesthetic and expressive as well as social and economic values. The result was a form of entrepreneurship that conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services and even of seeing the world (Formica, 2016).

The Renaissance bottega has lessons for the open innovation milieux of our times on how to turn ideas into action, foster dialogue and facilitate the convergence of art and science (Formica, 2017).

Transculturation and anti-discipline: Two cultural masks in the open innovation theatre

Coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1940), the term ‘transculturation’ refers to the reciprocal exchange of cultural influences that overlap one another. ‘Anti-discipline’ is a method that breaks down the barriers separating disciplines and specializations. As the Reverend Patrick McLaughlin (1964) relates, in early 19th-century Europe, an educational process embracing such a method was initiated by St Patrick’s College, Maynooth – the National Catholic Seminary of Ireland, founded in 1795. Each student, without exception, undertook a wide range of studies that included, in addition to theology, humanities, rhetoric, belles-lettres, logic, mathematics and physics. Physics was studied under the guidance of the Professor of Natural Philosophy (as physics was then known) Nicholas Callan (1799–1864), the Irish priest and scientist to whom we shall return shortly. Subsequently, however, universities tended towards overspecialization, with its associated psychological walls, which has only recently been seriously questioned. The fuse of the debate was lit by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who saw anti-discipline as an ‘adversary relation that often exists when fields of study at adjacent levels of organization first begin to interact’ and generate creative tensions (Wilson, 1978: 7).

With the aim of breaking down barriers, Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab founded by Nicholas Negroponte, fights to ensure that ‘more people [can] work in the wide-open white space between disciplines – the anti-disciplinary space’ (Ito, 2014). Broadening the perspective one can see, in the economy of ideas, the significance and continuing growth of the contribution of convergence – defined by Siegfried (2006) as ‘merger fever’ – between scientific (mathematics and the physical and natural sciences) and humanities subjects, and how open innovation, whose richness lies in the cultural diversity of participants, can accelerate that trend.

Transculturation, anti-discipline and knowledge convergence enter the stage as protagonists in the conversation that animates open innovation, creating encounters among people previously unknown to one another. It is by wearing now one, now another of the cultural masks provided by open innovation culture that all players in the field can give of their best.

The psychological space of open innovation

‘Walls are in the mind’ – this is one of the suggestions deployed along the ‘Path of Meditation’ on the Island of San Giulio in Lake Orta, northern Italy. Playing the game of open innovation, we change our minds. As Virgil says, ‘…terraeque urbesque recedunt’ (The Aeneid, III, line 72, quoted by Seneca in Epistulae morales to Lucilius, III, 28) – ‘…leave the cities and the shores behind’, in Dryden’s 1697 translation (Virgil, 2009: 92).

Passion combined with determination can produce outstanding results. In ‘The First Word to Cross the Ocean’, one of five ‘historical miniatures’, Stefan Zweig (2016) recounts that, leveraging the power of electricity, it was the passion as well as the will to succeed that allowed Cyrus W. Field to bring about the laying of submarine cables for telegraphic transmissions between Europe and America. It took 8 years, from 1858 to 1866, and several attempts to achieve the desired result. Field’s great effort resulted in the mobilization of the very substantial funding that such an ambitious project required. If, apart from that of finance, other gates had been open in the field of innovation, perhaps the time taken would have been shorter. What is now called Open Innovation 2.0 is expected to speed up the journey from ideation to completion.

Epilogue: Open innovation, our unique ‘Swann’s Way’

Incompatible with the still predominant, if old-fashioned business model, open innovation culture finds fertile ground in entrepreneurship modelled by talented individuals who combine science and arts, thus taking wider-reaching actions to develop and experiment with innovation. Entrepreneurial enterprises collaborate with universities and public and private research centres to innovate by designing customized products and services that result from the identification of latent needs, not only from the demand, of individuals and groups.

As in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in a tisane evokes for the narrator Marcel the atmosphere of Combray, the provincial town where he spent many summers of his childhood, so open innovation brings us back to the childhood of our knowledge. With the mindset of a beginner, we follow the path of our ‘love affair’ with a new knowledge, our ‘Swann’s Way’, which, unlike the outcome in the novel, pushes us into the arms of a lover – open innovation – who wants to make us happy. As we travel along that path, we free our minds from the deep and circumscribed beliefs that have matured with experience, and from the arrogance of success achieved which urges us to prepare for tomorrow with the plans of yesterday.