in the early days and still today Open Innovation focused in how to source new ideas, particularly the ones that were already half-baked pre-tested. Still most of what happens in Open Innovation revolves around scouting innovative products or projects that have a limited but significance acceptance in the market but that are not widely diffused and incorporate them into the innovation pipeline.
However, though important, sourcing ideas is probably not the biggest problem of a company. Most companies and startups try to clear what we call market risk: to elucidate which ideas will be successful in the market and which ones no.
If we take a look at the recent hits we will find plenty of ideas such as whatsapp which in the beginning their success was far from clear. How to reduce this uncertainty is probably the biggest problem in business, startups are at the end nothing else but a device for clearing this risk.