Addressing the Culture of Innovation--and Beyond

It’s January 25, 2011 in Scottsdale Arizona @ the 10th Annual Conference on Co-Development and Open Innovation. I have a microphone down by my side. I look at our next speaker and ask, “Are you ready?” He nods slowly, and replies quietly, with his Korean-accented English, “Yes. Ready.” After my brief intro, Chris looks up at the audience, and although his boyish face appears a bit bewildered, he speaks with confidence, albeit laced with trepidation. He doesn’t look comfortable while speaking—even a bit stiff—which I naively attribute to the same cultural and language issues that faced our presenters from Europe. But it was much more than that.

Chris Ryu is from LG, the multi-billion dollar Korean mega corporation whose TVs, appliances, and electronics flood the Best Buys, Costcos and Walmarts across America. Most Americans my age form their understanding of Korea from watching reruns of M*A*S*H, so I really didn’t understand at the time how groundbreaking this event I was witnessing really was. I just thought it was another presentation, but it was really so much more. Chris clicked the little remote mouse with his thumb, as slides describing LG’s product scope moved across the screen. “I am very pleased to see some Korean and Asian companies attending this conference … and I hope in the future to see many more presenting like I am doing,” he explained. “Because in Korea, we simply do not do this.”

The “this” he was talking about was the simple act of talking about his company … to ANYone. Every presentation at this conference was about opening up company doors, working with outsiders and sharing information, often intimate, valuable information. In our western world of Linux and Facebook, this is no big deal, but in Korea, it’s like having to endure the worst torture of your life and then being forced to smile and say you like it. But something is coercing them and other Koreans to take a right angle turn out of their comfort zone and to make that first leap of faith into the chilly pond.

Management Roundtable and PDMA (pdma.org) have been partnering for 10 years producing this conference that is all about companies, well, partnering. LG is like most companies in attendance: they are very successful, they have a high rate of growth, and they have tremendous pressure to sustain and even increase that growth year to year, similar to how P&G demands of itself to create billion-dollar markets from scratch every fiscal quarter. All of the companies at this event look at Open Innovation as the source of this growth. They search for it everywhere, like modern day Ponce de Leon’s, lured by the promise of everlasting corporate salad days.

Chris continued, describing how LG has taken what they learned from attending past conferences and implementing their own Open Innovation program that is clearly modeled on what they’ve seen others present. In addition to the requisite pithy name and fresh logo, LG’s “Collaborate & Innovate” program is not that different from what you’d see at P&G, Nestle, or any of the others who paved this road before. LG’s presentation reads like a checklist from OI boy scouts: International Technology Scouting group? Check. Web portal for soliciting and managing external ideas? Check. Uncooperative and resistant workforce and business culture? Check and double check.

Even though just about every single presentation at this event highlights corporate culture as a major challenge, for Korean companies this factor is magnified by their reputation as fierce and competitive businesspersons. This competitive nature combined with other factors such as Confucian ethics creates the environment where sharing and being open with others presents a pervasive cognitive dissonance that is tough to crack.

During Q&A, the first question came from Joon Hyuk Yee of KnowledgeWorks, also from Korea. “First,” Joon said, “I am very proud that you are doing this as it is very difficult for us Koreans to embrace this Open Innovation and people here probably don’t understand that for you to give this presentation is quite unprecedented. So thank you for helping us to create change and helping us become more comfortable with these necessary actions. I hope, like you, that other companies in Asia will begin to follow suit and that we see them here next year.”

Critics of Open Innovation like to point out that it is nothing new, and that partnerships and alliances are as old as business itself. They also like to note that many OI projects fail outright, and that many companies abandon ship soon after setting sail. Whatever. The companies at this conference could be less concerned with the repeating lifecycle of business management concepts. When privacy prone cultures in Asia start to stick their necks out in a way that defies all they have believed in how business should be done, this is not without significance.

Will they come? How serious are they? At the request of our Korean delegates, we are moving the dates of next year’s event to not interfere with Asia’s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year. That’s the easy part. Getting more of them to play “show and tell”? We will just have to wait and see. After all, they simply don’t do that.