Leading Portfolio Partnerships & Innovation Ecosystem Building

Open innovation challenges save money and reduce time to market by tapping into research and development done by others and giving you access to innovation that is ready for commercialisation.

Open innovation results in the co-creation and development of your sector’s eco-system, with you at the helm, and a structured network to build upon. We help you to develop Open innovation practices, like accelerators and incubators. We help to specify and implement these programmes, as well as act as an intermediary for Commercial, Academic and Government partnerships, accessing the funding you need to make your business successful.

Our access to finance programme covers small technology companies looking for early stage grant funding through to larger companies, academia and governmental agencies looking to put together a complex collaborations.

We target your real problems to deliver real results, engaging both start-ups and corporate partners.

See open innovation within SafetyTech

Learn about our work with the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator Programme

Our methodology

Defining challenges

Defining the right challenge is often the biggest hurdle when implementing open innovation. You need to frame your challenge in a way that is easy to understand by external parties, often with companies who do not work in your sector. It can be difficult to see past internal barriers and traditional ideas so challenges can become limiting and not get to the heart of a problem. We have extensive experience in helping companies to overcome these issues to define a challenge which will deliver truly innovative solutions.

Engaging partners

Once you have defined the right challenge the next step is to ensure you are engaging the right companies to respond to it. The best innovation comes from cross-sector collaborations, bringing the expertise of a different industry together with your own. We will help you identify the key skills needed to meet your challenge and target the right tech communities that can bring these skills to your business.

Identifying viable concepts

The challenge of working with technology outside your domain is that it can be difficult to identify which ideas and concepts are viable and have potential to bring value to your business. By pairing our expertise in digital technology with your deep understanding of the sector you operate in, we can help find the right companies to work with to solve your innovation challenge.

Facilitating trials

Once you have chosen the right idea and partner to deliver we will help you in working with the technology company to run a pre-commercial trial. This will allow both of you to test out technology, business models and new working relationships in a low risk environment before moving on to a more commercial relationship.

Why use open innovation challenges?

Open innovation challenges are the modern alternative to traditional procurement and mean that you don’t just find a serviceable solution but the best solution possible.

This method of innovation produces highly successful results as it plays to the strengths of both parties and allows them to co-create a solution. For the start-ups the expertise and guidance of established sector leaders can be instrumental in building a successful product. As a larger organisation this process allows you to help shape product development and the trial provides a low risk way of trying out new ideas. Working with a start-up and learning from the way in which they work enriches internal innovation initiatives.