My good friend, Niclas Nilsson, Head of R&D Open Innovation at LEO Pharma asked this question on LinkedIn today as he is looking for input for a presentation. This got me thinking so here you get my take on the future of open innovation with a 10-year perspective.

Every company and organization buys into external collaboration. Today, I divide companies into three groups when it comes to the level of open innovation maturity.

The first group is still stuck with the why question as in why should we even open up our company and innovate with external partners. This is about 20% today.

The second group gets the why, have some or even a lot of experience, but they are still working to figure out the how in the context of their situation. This is the large majority with about 70% today.

The third group of companies and organizations – about 10% – fully buy into external collaboration and they are getting to a level where this is transforming their entire company. Several business units and functions work with external partners to bring out better products and services faster, but they want even more so they are willing to open up almost all of their assets and resources to the outside, they are OK with the lack of control that comes with this and they are willing to experiment on anything related to their business.

10 years from now, about 30% of all companies and organizations will be in the second group and about 50% will be in the third group (about 50%) and then we have about 20% that will be in the next category as they take some of the elements below to new heights.

We don’t use the term open innovation anymore. When everyone starts working with external partners, this will become the norm. So there will be no need to distinguish between the traditional form of innovation which tends to be based on internal resources and driven by R&D and open innovation which is based on internal and external resources and with partnerships that go beyond R&D and technologies and also involves processes, services and business models. It just becomes innovation. We can drop the “open” word.

We will have sophisticated systems to allow for more virtual collaboration. The platform and service providers are getting and better and as technologies needed to facilitate open innovation efforts in general grow, this will help us have even more virtual interactions. This brings down the geographical barriers even more and the whole world truly becomes your playground.

These platforms and systems will also allow companies to interact with partners in different confidentiality layers that will address the issues around the protection – and common creation – of intellectual property.

Big data kicks in and takes over important parts of the innovation process. As the raw data power grows and as companies get more and more data to work with, we will see that much of our innovation efforts will be driven by algorithms and machine learning. By this, I mean that we will see massive simulation efforts that will look into not only what new technologies – and in particular the merging of technologies – can do, but also how we can create the services, processes and business models by themselves or around the products we bring to market. We don’t have to test this in various phases as we used to. We will “just” simulate this.

An early example is the aircraft industry where many parts today are “tested” in simulations and then sent almost directly to production and use.

People still matter, but their roles will change. The mindset and the traits of the best innovators as we know them today will not change much. They will still be curious, open-mind people who excel at solving problems and seeing new opportunities while having the personal skills to lead or contribute to the process of bringing “innovation” through the discovery, incubation and acceleration phases.

However, one key thing will change with regards to the skills and toolbox required by these people. They will have much stronger “data management” skills.

Ecosystems will be massive. Much of the external collaboration that happens today is still based on 1-1 interactions as in one company innovates with another company. We are starting to see more and more 1-many interactions where one company brings together different partners in one or more ecosystems and set the direction for the combined efforts. A few companies are also dipping their toes with many-many interactions where the ecosystems and directions are established in partnerships of several equal players.

10 years from now, we will see massive ecosystems in which you can tap in and out of external collaboration partnerships just like you get water from the tap. This will be with companies and organizations (open innovation), but also with individuals (crowd/outsourcing). These massive ecosystems will look a bit chaotic for the untrained and unprepared, but bring so many opportunities to the trained and prepared.

Compensation elements will not change much for individuals. When it comes to contributions from individuals, companies will be in a constant battle to get their attention and thus input for innovation. The key attributes for this to happen in the context of compensation will be around vanity (the see me effect), money, giving fun experiences, playing to people’s interests and providing learning opportunities. Maybe we will also see a higher element of social innovation (the do good things effect).

IoT as a new layer. We can already today sense the next layer of open innovation and external collaboration. Here we go from “just” having companies and people working together to also have sensors and systems from different platforms interacting with each other in order to bring out new solutions. Digitalization and in particular the internet of things movement will change everything.

The role of trust diminishes. This one is a bit strange and scary. I have always said that trust is key for any relationship and in particular when it comes to external collaboration for innovation purposes. But if more and more of the interaction will happen between machines and systems rather than people, the role of trust diminishes. Machines and systems will care less about trust and these “soft things” and focus more on hard core results.

Maybe the operators of the machines and systems (real people) can teach the machines and systems that trust and good ethics in the long run bring better business results. If this still holds true in the future. Hey, this gets interesting and a bit far out…

The work force will be much more flexible. As an indirect element for the open innovation efforts, we will see that the work force will continue to become more flexible. We will see more free agents and more contributions based on the processes related to the sharing economy. This is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to societal stability and progress and it will put strains on governments to provide the proper frameworks.

The winners are to be determined. The winners will be the ones who are very open ad very fast on the execution part. There is so much information available and so many ideas to explore. The key is execution. The winners will also be willing to experiment with everything. Not only products and services, but also with their business models, work force and organizational structures. The race has begun, but the pole positions yet alone championships are still up for grabs.

This is what I can think of right now. More perspectives will develop and I appreciate your input and inspiration for this to happen. Please comment.