CARLOS MEZA ON OPEN INNOVATION

Interview with Carlos Meza, CEO of CreativeConnector

In a new market, you’re not playing chess anymore; now you’re playing poker. You don’t know all the information in advance. Instead, you have to decide whether to spend additional money to stay in the game to see the next card.

Former IBM research director James McGroddy

Tell me Carlos why do the corporations ask startups to innovate for them?

The reason is because open innovation is here to stay. We are trying to achieve the flexibility and the practical approach to problem solving that startups have. This is usually very difficult for corporations regarding their current structure and work flows and processing they have. CreativeConnector exists to bridge this gap. We are approaching open innovation. That means that not only corporations can bring innovations from within but they also need to go to market and use technologies that are there for their own benefit. For improvement of sale, product offering or service offer prepositions.

So the reason the corporations are not to do so by themselves is that their own inside processes are too complicated?

Correct. Open innovation is a concept that involves usage of not only information or ideas within your company but also reaches out to market for other market ideas. Why? It is not because corporations are not able to design innovation. Open innovation allows you to prepare yourself as a corporation to new ideas and new insights from the market within. That means that not only you use your own ideas or your own experiences from the market but also use technologies and other ideas and inspiration from outside your company. So research and development turns into open esteem and you are facing benefits

of co-innovating and codeveloping.

Where did this idea of innovation come from?

The concept of open innovation was coined by Henri Chesbrough in 2003. His work reaches out to corporations, where he made a research on how these factors of closed innovations are effecting the development of the corporations. Scientifically and statistically proven it is the best new practice on the market. To be able to open yourself. XEROX Park for example. That is a let's say XEROX research and development in house hub involved in many technologies development. Unfortunately they were not efficient, they did not have the processes or structure resilient or flexible enough to bring value to XEROX. Because the held on the closed innovation paradigm. But many of those ideas are now „spinoffs“. We have Cisco and many other companies. If you have an open innovation available and set up workforce ready, you could be able to spin off those ideas and use it to provide value to your corporation. And there are many other examples.

So you can guarantee it works?

It works. It's a working proven method of researching a market, finding synergies and adjust processes from start up to corporations and this is where Creative Connector jumps in.

Ok, in the end let me satisfy my curriosity and tell how did you appear in Czech Republic? You are from Peru, right?

Right. I was born in Peru but my great grandfather was Czech from Pardubice. Jaroslav Dušek was his name. He came to Peru and married my great grandmother. I came to Prague 10 years ago after working in South America and the United States, so I came here with a multinational company and started to do business here in the region and fell in love with Prague. One thing led to another and I started to be more and more involved with start ups ecosystems in the city and the country. I moved to CreativeDock and CreativeConnector because I believe that it is the last frontier on open innovation

and co-development using both words: start ups and corporations.