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Last Monday I made a short presentation at the Philips Innovations Services, a new consultancy wing of the company, about ‘people-driven innovation’, one the the buzzwords these days. The triggering point for me was a study by Erik van Hippel from MIT Sloan (I wrote about this work a while ago – see Dark matters of innovation), but to present his conclusions in a more comprehensible manner I had to first present an entire spectrum of various degrees of people involvement into business-driven innovation:

I bet that although some of the part and pieces of this spectrum were familiar to the audience (there were about ten consultants in the room), its totality, the whole framework was a new thing. And so was an entire ‘people-driven’ part, which I juxtaposed to business approaches; here I followed the binary logic by van Hippel (as well as many others, of course, Pyramid to Pancakes would by just one example). Some of the examples, lille an open source biotech or community-driven genetic research, triggered quite a discussion.

But my own story was very different from the usual take on these examples; I argued that we shouldn’t get stuck in the neurotic fights between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between business-driven vs people-driven approaches, but rather construct a more holistic and integrated approach (and corresponding practices), of multiple role and position. Alas, integrated things don’t sell very well.

Anyway, the slides can be found at Win novation or wikinnovation . There are a couple of points I didn’t manage talk about, like the whole Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne, but I decided to leave them.