Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookShelf - Brief Article - Book Review

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. By Henry Chesbrough. Harvard Business School Press, 227 pages. $35.

Ignoring anything that was "not invented here," writes Henry Ches-brough, is an approach akin to an ostrich sticking its head firmly in the sand. Indeed, he's certain that the old ways of doing technology research--which tended to exclude ideas hatched outside that immediate company or location--are self-defeating.

Chesbrough--who has an intriguing resume that lists a Ph.D, stints as an operating technology executive and Bain & Co. consultant, and now a professorship at Harvard Business School--drew inspiration for the book from a study he did of the famed Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, Calif. Xerox had mismanaged that facility, he concluded, by acting as if it had a monopoly on all the smart ideas and the top people in the field, yet "most of the spin-offs from PARC created their value by linking to and exploiting knowledge that Xerox did not have."

Open innovation, as he presents it, means that ideas can come from inside or outside a company, and products...