Networked Innovation: Enterprise Innovation in Collaboration with the Startup Community
What is Networked Innovation? At Startgrid we define it as a scalable system for delivering external innovation to the enterprise.
Why is this strategic to enterprise innovation teams? There’s a rising chorus of voices talking about a new model of enterprise innovation. A model increasingly focused on combining internal innovation with a systematic approach to collaborating with the startup community:
- Deloitte talks about the power of business ecosystems
- Fortune talks about increasing collaboration between enterprises and startups
- CB Insights discussing changing nature of corporate innovation and enterprises viewing the startup community as outsourced R&D in an age of increased innovation velocity
- Innovation Leader discusses the explosion of corporate innovation labs
- Harvard Business Review publishes a piece arguing for greater collaboration between enterprises and startups greater collaboration between enterprises and startups
- Imaginatik and MassChallenge study finds that “82% of corporations now view interactions with startups as “somewhat important” to “very important”, and 23% indicated that these interactions were “mission critical”.”
Successful innovation is no longer exclusively about what you develop internally. The global landscape is moving too fast to build it all yourself. Too many emerging technologies have become relevant to your product and the changing nature of your relationship with your customers … big data, mobile, AI, VR, IoT … these technologies will impact a wide range of established enterprises across multiple industry sectors, for better or worse. And they will come to market more rapidly than ever before.
Given the constant battle for time to market and innovation leadership, those enterprises that adapt to these rapid technology changes and implement Networked Innovation strategies to source innovation will shift the competitive landscape. Innovation labs, corporate VC, accelerators, and innovation challenges are all component pieces of this new business process. The keys to success will be how well this toolset is combined into a scalable innovation supply chain.
We believe that the innovation battle will increasingly be won by the development of global networks to source solutions, having the right systems and culture in place to effectively deliver these solutions to internal stakeholders, and then measuring and optimizing the process.
The result will be enterprises with the ability to out-innovate their competition, identify new growth opportunities, and reduce the risk of disruption. And hundreds of billions of dollars of market value are at stake. Sound far fetched? We’ll use this forum to build the case for Networked Innovation and how enterprises can optimize how they find, deliver and measure external innovation.
Next week join us here as we explore strategies for finding and managing your innovation sources.
