StartupCafe

We got a lotta snow right now. Hack together a sledge, make a snowman, have a snowball fight. And when that’s all over, grab a big chair by a fire and read a real, live book. Here’s one that’s worth your attention: Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape, by Henry Chesbrough.

Two reasons to get your hands on this book now: firstly, Open Innovation is the focus of a new multi-million pound EU initiative for northwest Europe that launches this year. Several big players in the UK are directly involved, including the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, the City of Edinburgh Council, and UCL. Secondly, Chesbrough himself, the leading authority on Open Innovation worldwide, is coming to Edinburgh in the spring as part of the Engage Invest Exploit investment conference.

Open Innovation is “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.” (Chesbrough 2006) Basically, the message is this: not all of the smart people work for you, and most companies can no longer afford to ignore the wealth of resource outside their corporate boundaries.

That still might sound dry if you’re a startup, but Open Innovation is also the solid theoretical basis for ideas like crowd-sourcing. See? It is interesting. Moreover, the EU seem to think open business models can make European startups more competitive against other regions (read: Silicon Valley), and they’re putting serious cash behind it.

So if you’re taking a snow day today, or you find yourself snowed in over the weekend, take a minute to figure out how this latest fad in entrepreneurship can benefit your startup. Open business models have real bite, and they’re going to become an increasingly important trend in funding and support initiatives in 2011.