Upcoming trends in corporate innovation
Innovation has become the little black dress for corporates, especially this past year. The go-to solution when everything else fails, a safe trend to follow and a must have for all. However very few have managed to end up on the best dressed list with it. To implement successfully an innovation program, corporates need to commit time and resources, overcome organizational barriers, but above all, need a committed leadership that is open and honest about the company’s innovation strategy and the risk involved.
There are many options as far as innovation programs and initiatives go, with 38% of the leading 200 companies having set up innovation centers in a global tech hub. Open innovation — “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”.’ — has become of growing importance for many firms who recognise it’s next to impossible to keep up with the rapidly changing technological landscape focusing only on internal processes.
As open innovation is setting in, Nesta’s report found that almost 1 out of three accelerator programs in Europe is run or supported by a corporate, many companies and industry bodies try to assess progress made and set a framework to improve current practices.
Transparency and managing expectations on boths sides is not only crucial to the success of the programs, but also can give a competitive edge to the corporates, enabling them to stand out and attract the hottest and in demand startups in the game. We’ve seen a lot of industry bodies and organizations publish open innovation frameworks and we will only see more vertical focused ones popping up this coming year. For example The Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) recently unveiled a 10-point pledge which agencies can sign up to and share with startups to demonstrate their commitment to “an open, fair, and jointly beneficial partnership”. Nesta also has published a series of toolkits and guides on efficient collaboration between startups and corporates. Touchpaper, to be launched later this year, is a new organization focused on providing clear collaboration guidelines, from culture to procurement and legal, for corporates and startups. Collaboration between two companies going at a completely different speed with a dramatically different complexity of structure is a challenge. There is a number of internal and external obstacles both sides need to overcome to make such a collaboration work and transparency and clear communication is vital to improving its odds of success. Formalized guidelines can manage expectations and lead to faster project execution, higher internal engagement and work as a remedy to sporadic innovation. Whether you chose to commit to a third party guidelines or form and publish your own, communicating clearly your level of commitment, expectations and way of work is not only desirable in order to attract top talent, but also expected by most startups that have seen their gains of such a collaboration evaporate under the burden of a slow and gigantic corporate structure.
Another remarkable change for corporate innovation this past year is also that the trend of corporate accelerators has plateaued. There’s been a slower pace of corporate accelerator launches and a big change: the entry of collaborative corporate accelerators. This shift of mindset is evident in accelerators like Techstars Music Accelerator, Collider and ASOS accelerator in partnership with Wayra UK, part of Telefónica Open Future_. The benefit for corporates that participate in collaborative programs is not only risk mitigation, but also access to a neutral platform enabling the exchange of best practices and ideas to improve the industry at large. The next natural step, building on top of this already promising paradigm is cross industry collaboration for open innovation programs, for example a hackathon in partnership with a retailer and a finance industry player challenging the payment process in store, or could be a research lab on smart textiles in partnership with a space agency, a fashion brand and a university.
Transparency and diversity fuel change, progress and can add substantial value vertically and horizontally to big players. Having tested the waters and mastered floating in the dark sea of innovation it is time for big firms to dive in. Time to do your homework and make the jump!
As appeared in: http://www.havasmedia.co.uk/2017/04/innovation-new-little-black-dress/
