Blockchain applied to Open Innovation

“How did we get to Open Innovation that puts new ideas on the table, making them accessible to everyone? The certifier role that Blockchain can give to ever faster innovative processes. “

Blockchain and business: greater trust to generate efficiency and opportunities.

Much has been said about Blockchain, but as a non-technical person with an economic background, I prefer to focus on the current context, the ongoing change, and how we got here.

For me, for the average person, for the entrepreneur, the adoption of a shared and immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network promotes development and growth. Business depends on information that, the faster and more accurate it is, the better.

Blockchain is ideal for providing this information because it provides immediate, shared, and completely transparent information stored in an immutable register that can only be accessed by authorized network members.

Everything will be faster, increasingly faster, and potentially we could do without banks, notaries, financial institutions, and so on. A Blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, and production. And since members share the same single view of the truth, it is possible to see all the details of an end-to-end transaction, thus generating greater trust, as well as new efficiency and opportunities.

Blockchain as a tool to enhance national potential.

The coronavirus pandemic has given a strong acceleration to the development methods that in the coming years will be the basis of every growth process, not only in terms of technological evolution, not only in Italy. But it will be only thanks to the adoption of a new culture, in which innovation becomes a shared value at every organizational level, that even Italian companies, traditionally smaller than those of other industrialized countries, will be able to compete by exploiting the ability to innovate that has made them famous.

The health crisis forced us to smart working and pushed us towards virtual relationships, towards videoconferences, with considerable time savings and potentially great environmental benefits.

In this context, which quickly burns everything, the certifier role of Blockchain is irreplaceable.

Open innovation, which is much talked about today but which few are able to define since the process is ongoing, is nothing but a new philosophy in which the strategic and cultural approach is very different from the so-called Closed innovation, where research and development activities were confined within the company perimeter and ideas to be transformed into new products and services were protected by protection mechanisms such as patents and industrial secrets.

The new strategic and cultural approach instead introduces a concept of openness that includes both internal ideas and resources and external solutions, tools, and technological skills that come from all innovative realities.

The opportunity is particularly attractive for a country like ours, hosted by small companies and great inventiveness; talent will be at the basis of development and growth, and the most modern infrastructures, the digital ones, will allow anyone to disseminate their knowledge globally.

The opportunity is not to be missed also because our entrepreneurial fabric, often made up of small excellences, needs to strengthen itself by joining together in complementary aggregations to face a challenge that Europe has already launched.

There are substantial funds available for those who will be able to highlight their potential. And Italy, at least in terms of talent, is second to none and, also thanks to what Blockchain provides today in terms of security and trust, we could surpass the physical infrastructure deficiency that in recent years has often placed us subordinate to other better organized states. We could easily take advantage of the digital highways on which the future of exchanges and business travels, on which talent travels.

New technologies and OIC – Open Innovation Centre.

It is crucial to be aware of the epochal transition we are going through. It is essential, especially for institutions and entrepreneurs, to do so quickly. Nonetheless, Italy is still among the seven most industrialized countries in the world and therefore must promote the aggregation of companies, in various forms, to safeguard our entrepreneurial fabric. If this does not happen, the risk of cannibalization that we are already experiencing, by large foreign groups, could lead to irreparable impoverishment.

Some regions are equipping themselves with ad hoc regional laws aimed at promoting the development of OICs, Open Innovation Centers. Personally, I see an OIC as a large physical and virtual square, animated by the custodians of talent including universities, research institutes, and industrial associations.

In this modern agora, students and entrepreneurs will be able to verify whether and how to transform their ideas into sustainable projects and find the first funding through local and European tenders as well as hackathons and “call for ideas.” They will know how to select the right incubator to push startups and find the booster to accelerate the transformation of SMEs.

Each Open Innovation Center in the network will have, at the end of the hallway or at the end of the sustainability verification process, the finance room where, by product sector, participatory purpose, type and method of financial support, a panel of proposals for funds, banks, business angels, institutional investors, and foundations will be accessible.

New technologies play a key role in the development of the Open Innovation model, thanks to their speed and effectiveness, allowing the dissemination of knowledge in all directions.

On the other hand, obstacles to the Open Innovation model, which must be quickly removed with information and training, are represented by the fear of the new, which can be both cultural, such as the inability to network and the inability to create or share knowledge among company departments, outside or towards other companies and consumers, and finally structural, such as resistance to change that hinders the reorganization of work necessary to achieve co-innovation.

I am convinced that only those who can imagine what the world of work will be like in five or ten years, making full use of what technology offers today, can easily ride the epochal revolution that has just begun.

It is now commonplace to say that most of the jobs that will be performed in a few years are still unknown and that many current activities will need to be revised in light of the ongoing evolution, or they risk disappearing forever. In Europe, other markets are moving quickly, advantaged by the discipline and size of their companies.

We have the talent that, if shared safely according to this new approach, and Blockchain allows just that, it can reward our entrepreneurship, our economy, our country.