A journalist recently asked me this question: What are the five things the CEO of a once-innovative company must do to “innovate innovation” (or innovate the innovation process) and get the creativity process humming again?

As a follow-up to my slightly provocative blog post, Why Open Innovation is Not for Small Companies, I have begun looking further into the interesting topic on how small companies can innovate with others.

I believe the best way to get smarter and acquire new knowledge on innovation is through articles and blog posts rather than reading books. It is just my experience that it works better both in terms of value and time spent.

What are the common mistakes or missteps that organizations should avoid as they try to build trust with their constituencies? It would be great to have a discussion on this so I look forward to your input based on my discussion starter below.

It is difficult to find good cases on how smaller companies have engaged with open innovation. It is also difficult to give strong advice on how such companies should engage with open innovation.

What are the reasons that companies embrace open innovation? Here comes a few examples:

I have cited Psion Teklogix, provider of rugged mobile computers, several times on my blog for their promising approach to open innovation. Last month, the company took a big step forward with its strategic interpretation of open innovation – called Open Source Mobility (OSM) – when it brought its global partners together for a series of conferences at which they unveiled a new platform designed to give resellers and developer partners the opportunity to co-create with Psion.

Companies have begun using social media tools in order to further build their networks and engage with their innovation stakeholders. This creates what we can call touch points – situations in which a person or company interact with their current and/or future stakeholders.

Once upon a time, we had many corporate venture units that invested in external projects as well as in internal projects from the corporate groups that they belonged to.

Many people ask what open innovation is. I suggest that you should view open innovation as a philosophy or a mindset that you should embrace within your organization. In a more practical definition, open innovation is about bridging internal and external resources and act on those opportunities. The value proposition this gives companies that get it right is simply too good to miss out on.

Open innovation at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) presents both great opportunities and great challenges. Forming open innovation relationships can give a growing enterprise access to resources that might normally are beyond their reach with the potential for greatly speeding up time to market. At the same time, working with larger–and in some case much larger companies–is not without its perils.

I recently held a workshop in which a couple of the participants – all from the same company – had some struggles finding out why they should embrace open innovation.

Innovation. Just the word or term itself is enough to start heated discussions.

I really enjoyed the recent Open Innovation Summit in Chicago. As I reflect on the many presentations and interactions, I think of the follow-up questions I would ask these big companies that work hard on their open innovation efforts.

GE got their share of the headlines in the innovation community last month. I think it is well deserved as they gave us a very good example on how innovation is shaping up in the corporate world with their Ecomagination Challenge.