Open Innovation — bringing the outside in
Corporates that want to stay ahead of their market, can’t just rely on own internal knowledge and resources. Collaboration across the boundaries of their own organization is crucial to drive innovation.
In recent years, I have seen a wide range of “Open Innovation” tactics emerging. There is no single solution to innovation. Large companies are opting for a diversified Open Innovation policy that is built around different instruments to stimulate bringing the outside-in:
- Cooperation with start-ups is particularly interesting for companies that are looking for accelerating their digital transformation. Organizing start-up challenges or pitching sessions allows to find start-ups that are relevant for their own business. Collaborating with start-ups allows corporates to gain a fast access to know-how about new IT technologies and to rapid implementation of innovations through start-ups.
- Collaboration with incubators and accelerators provides corporates the ability to outsource their open innovation activities. Corporate outsourced acceleration programmes create the optimal conditions for moving closer to innovation, while leveraging external resources for scouting of and co-creating with start-ups.
- Organising hackathons is a great booster of creativity. It allows corporates to experience the power of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Hackathons are limited in time, facilitating in parallel several diverse teams to work intensively on an innovation with the goal to create a prototype. The most viable ideas will be selected to elaborate further after the hackathon.
- If companies don’t want to bring startups in-house, they can go out into the world. Corporate leaders organise innovation excursions to meet startups and businesses that they think are leading the way in a particular market or technology. The team will find inspiration to take back and share with their colleagues
- Disruptive innovation doesn’t necessarily happen around corporate headquarters. Corporations therefor establish “antennas” for (open) innovation in regions where things are happening, such as in Silicon Valley, Tel-Aviv or Asia. These antenna offices allow corporates to emerge into the local ecosystem, to host events and interact with local partners and startups, linking back to the internal accelerator program. The aim is to be a pioneer in the field of innovation.
- Corporate venturing allows corporates to fully understand innovation by having a stake in companies doing what they are interested in. Investing in startups help companies understand the space startups are in, stay updated and eventually guide development of a technology, product, or service.
What is Open innovation?
If corporates want to innovate products, services, business models or processes effectively, they can’t just rely on internal knowledge, sources and resources. A separate and isolated R&D department is no longer sufficient. On the contrary, the boundaries of knowledge and creativity must be pushed.
Open Innovation embraces the outside-in approach, opening the innovation process to external stakeholders in order to get access to market information, new ideas, innovative solutions, emerging technologies and creative individuals. The combination of internal R&D with open innovation provides a pathway to sustainable innovation resulting in tangible business results.
Organizations should not hesitate to leverage the added value of people from outside to accelerate their innovation activities. Openness and collaboration have always been a necessity for small companies to stay agile and move fast. Nowadays large multinationals actively invest in building their innovation ecosystem, a network of diverse players eager to collaborate and share knowledge.
What are the benefits of Open Innovation?
The benefits of open innovation are hard to deny. Collaboration usually leads to the discovery of totally new concepts, ideas and technologies. Partnerships allow to experiment by using existing technology of other organizations. By calling on partners with additional expertise companies can drastically shorten development time. Moreover, they share the costs if they collaborate with other companies. If not, they fail fast and they fail cheap.
Contributing to an innovation community and having connections with various external actors (such as suppliers, customers, universities and startups,…) results in following benefits:
- opportunity to work with exciting startups to speed up digital transformation
- collaborations with like-minded organisations, researchers and technology providers to achieve innovation that they can never handle alone
- higher accuracy in market research and trend analysis
- cross-innovation with individuals and organizations outside the industry or sector can lead to entirely innovative ideas
- access to a wider pool of talent
- reduced cost of conducting Research and Development
- faster go to market
Examples of platforms for Open Innovation
WEAR Sustain brings together e-pioneers in wearable technology, smart and electronic textiles to collaborate on ethical and sustainable solutions and technologies for more sustainable clothing. Fashion & Apparel professionals, entrepreneurs and academia join forces toward the evolution of wearables and e-textiles that are more ethical, critical and aesthetic, and ultimately more sustainable for future generations.
iTanks is a knowledge and innovation platform for the port-related industry. iTanks connects corporates, knowledge institutes and industry experts with and shares knowledge about new technologies and the latest innovations from within as well as outside the sector.
