Case
A global CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) company used to deploy large budgets. And long-term planning to develop and validate new products and brands.
Business Units (BUs) were not interested in collaborating with the Open Innovation team. Working with start-ups through supply arrangements and joint new product development was low on their priority list.
The Open Innovation team thus changed its approach.
Instead of pushing individual start-up profiles forward, they became a trend detector spotting tech and application trends. And plotting start-up activity onto it.
They also mapped the growth and innovation objectives on identified start-ups showing quick wins for the business units. And made assumptions about the likelihood of start-ups ending up with relative competitors.
That opened the eyes of the business unit managers.
Internal alignment emerged. And the Open Innovation team began to assess start-ups for selected innovation priorities together with the BUs.
What to learn from it?
1: Success in transforming innovation capability for large organizations is as much about behavioral change as process and digitization.
2: Cognitive research shows us that, like all humans, executives fear loss far more than they value potential gains.
Start-ups today have many options to choose from – like running to your competitors. Keep this in mind as you prepare for your next start-up partnering initiative.
