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While the open innovation concept proposed by Henry Chesbrough a decade ago has had some striking successes, the myriad options for engaging external partners can be daunting, so leaders need a guide for getting started that matches the needs of their firm. This paper aims to address this issue.

The paper identifies that innovation processes involve three stages during which the business model elements are conceived and elaborated: idea‐generation, idea‐development, and commercialization. The question for leaders is: “In which of the three stages could your growth efforts benefit from an infusion of external ideas and expertise?”

The open‐innovation approach does not require a company to replace all its current research and development (R&D) efforts. But it does change the primary question leaders should be asking to “How can my company create significantly more value by leveraging external partners to bring many more innovations to market?”

The article shows executives how they can systematically assess an innovation process, understand where new venture business models are weakest, and select the points at which open innovation could add some needed spark.

The article leads executives through two‐step process for introducing a customized open innovation program: step one, assess where your company's innovation process would benefit from external input by using five key questions; and step two, learn how to manage external relationships.

The authors of this paper contend that too many firms' innovation initiatives are shackled with archaic budgeting and planning methodologies that are intended to protect managers from the embarrassment of blown budgets, missed deadlines, or market flops but instead suppress learning and adaptability, both critical to achieving successful commercialization of unique ideas. This paper aims to address this issue.

The authors propose that the first step to rid myopia and rigidity from the stage‐gate approach is to re‐conceive it as an assumption‐driven process centered on learning, rather than simply a sequence of activities marching towards a pre‐determined outcome.

The authors suggest that firms should adopt assumption‐driven learning in a series of sequential divergent‐convergent cycles – one cycle per stage – each centered on testing the major assumptions for that stage.

Continuous learning and unlearning is essential to the process of developing raw ideas into viable commercial applications. The key to success is to test assumptions through real‐life experiments – for example, market assumptions should be tested in‐market, manufacturability assumptions should be tested in production.

Firms should adopt assumption‐driven learning in a series of sequential divergent‐convergent cycles – one cycle per stage – each centered on testing the major assumptions for that stage.

This paper posits that by selectively applying open innovation, companies can enrich their stock of valuable ideas, effectively manage product development and upgrade their emerging businesses without wholesale changes to their innovation initiative.

This is a case study of the open innovation process at Whirlpool Corporation written by two Strategos consultants who have worked with the firm.

Whirlpool has developed a set of questions and discussion guides that help to inform the decision to go “open” or not at each step of the innovation process.

Whirlpool believes that open innovation is really about building and maintaining relationships and alliances. These relationships are managed by “relationship managers” as part of the new business development activities.

By changing the context to competences within any organization, not just Whirlpool, the company is now considering and pursuing a number of opportunities that would have previously been rejected, and Whirlpool is successfully expanding its business to adjacent spaces through the help of open innovation partners.

Canons have been of interest to librarians dating back to the days when Robert Maynard Hutchins instituted the Great Books program at the University of Chicago. Hutchins did so at the suggestion of the popular philosopher, Mortimer Adler. When Adler later helped to popularize the program with the public, public libraries around the country became the sites for meetings of Great Books discussion groups.

Given the demonstrable deficiencies of indexing and indexes as means of document analysis and selection, a system is proposed which matches uncondensed and unanalysed texts with search requests and semantically equivalent transformations derived from them. The method utilizes the results of machine translation and structural linguistics in syntactic analysis and in semantic classification with adaptations to the requirements of a document selection system.