Open innovation is gaining ground. Recognized as important leverage for developing new perspectives, sourcing diverse and external expertise shakes up and invigorates the business ecosystem. The result is faster and more effective growth of innovation solutions. Harnessing technology, new skills, and novel approaches helps a business explore uncharted terrain that was previously out of reach.
Why not capitalise on your inhouse resources, encouraging your team’s participation in open innovation to get the best of both worlds ? An hybrid innovation model —mixing up internal and external resources and ensuring productive exchange—can create a fertile environment.
Innovation – cultivate potential to keep the competitive edge
Innovation is the lifeblood of all businesses, regardless of size or sector. It is vital for breathing life into competitive spirit, feeding growth, yielding to the winds of change, anticipating market evolutions, boosting competitive edge, and solving specific problems such as operational issues to cost cutting.
Innovation is now a team effort. The top-down process, relying on a tight circle of decision-makers or R&D divisions, smothered progress. Businesses realise that ideas and creativity are nourished by the rich diversity of internal and external sources.
Two models have yielded results, capitalising on collective intelligence to help businesses address their priorities:
- closed innovation when inhouse teams work together on new ideas and solutions, and
- open innovation when companies reach out to external sources, such as clients, partners, start-ups and researchers, to develop creative synergy to drive new ideas and solutions and widen the scope for action.
Hybrid innovation: the ideal climate for cultivating more fertile ideas
Typically, closed and open innovation operate in parallel, both showing results but never crossing paths.
But these two approaches—which have succeeded independently—can feed and nurture each other, giving birth to fertile exchange. Involving inhouse teams at key stages of the open innovation process is a fruitful way to harness new ideas and creative solutions.
Hybrid innovation, combining internal and external resources, boosts experimentation by optimising the potential of the two different approaches.
Venture into uncharted territory :
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A hybrid approach to innovation: blending internal and external resources for a win-win
Your teams will appreciate that the value of their experience in the field is recognized, without the weight of the ideation phase. And support from partially outsourcing some of the innovation process will be welcome.
Working in a dynamic ecosystem boosts your teams motivation to contribute. Being able to participate in open innovation gives them exposure to new methodologies such as lean start-up: using new collaborative practices with high added-value. Such exchange is an opportunity for your teams, developing their expertise, refining their soft skills, and providing them with tools they can exploit going forward.
Balancing internal and external forces helps innovation take root in real needs while benefiting from the energy and surge in creativity injected by external partners, which in turn makes harvesting results easier.
Such collaboration develops durable relations with external sources, like innovative start-ups and the business’s strategic suppliers. These synergies have potential to grow into strong partnerships, triggering opportunities for developing future projects and directly integrating innovation in the company’s ecosystem.
Cultivate a hybrid innovation approach
Key steps
→ Step 1 – Plant the seeds
Deeply rooted in operational reality, your teams are perfectly placed for identifying priorities and providing golden insight for guiding external contribution and aligning solutions with the company’s context.
Your team are experts of their environment, able to identify strategic issues like pain points, and obstacles they deal with every day. The first step is to include them, sourcing all that vital and pertinent information.
→ Step 2 – Engage external resources
Widen your horizons. Consult with external partners, harvesting ideas and solutions that respond to one or more or the needs identified in a tangible way.
Involving external resources has three benefits:
- Quickly developing solutions by mobilising specialised resources (perhaps limited internally);
- Drawing on different external perspectives to enhance your approach;
- Relieving the pressure on inhouse teams.
→ Step 3 – The maturation process
Engaging your teams in a co-construction phase with selected start-ups fosters a more agile and collaborative culture and helps with upskilling.
Including your team in the process optimises their engagement. They are more likely to be onboard with the chosen solutions, because they are more pertinent, making operational deployment smoother.
If your teams are already heavily mobilised, they can choose to incubate projects in a start-up studio. As a result, undertaking projects are realised externally without directly using internal resources.
The right tools for fruitful open innovation
Having an innovation management software is undeniably vital for giving structure to the various stages of the project, engaging stakeholders, and supporting the approach. Here’s why !
Understand your teams’ needs
Your teams need a simply and intuitive tool that allows them to express their needs and clearly shows the issues to be addressed
Use AI to identify key topics
Using a platform makes it easier to organize, classify, select priorities and insights. AI helps to identify important subjects and translate them into concrete ideation campaign.
A structured process ensures none of the identified needs are lost in the process or left to intuition. It also automates the fastidious selection of suggestions.
Use participation to get all the stakeholders on board
An innovation challenge has the fabulous capacity to actively engage. Using methods such as gamification, voting, and rewards drives healthy competition and harnesses optimal participation.
For example, your teams can contribute directly to solutions they consider the most pertinent. You can also reward start-ups according to their involvement which escalates team motivation.
Streamline collaboration after the ideation phase
An innovation management software simplifies internal project monitoring, providing for smoother exchange and encouraging co-construction. As a result, the business benefits from crossing expertise and aligning solutions that arise from concrete needs identified internally.
Digital platforms stimulate team action, giving them a dedicated arena to interact, contribute and codevelop regarding the solutions selected with external partners.
The keys to successful hybrid innovation
The keys to success that bear fruit:
→ Incentives for start-ups and external partners
Start-ups and external partners are crucial to open innovation. They provide vital new ideas, cutting-edge technology, and disruptive approaches.
To optimise their contribution, motivate them with carefully designed incentives: opportunities for visibility in social media and internal and external media, labels and awards, partnerships or the chance for a start-up to directly apply their solution to the company’s value chain.
→ Clear and carefully orchestrated communication
Communication plays a central role in successful open innovation, and it is much more than simply informing. Communication establishes connection between all the stakeholders, clarifies goals, and ensures everyone is travelling in the same direction and at the right pace. It is essential for maintaining motivation, for winding up a project and formulating a report, promoting initiatives, and announcing final application and implementation phases.
→ Encourage internal upskilling
Collective innovation also trains your teams in innovative methods and approaches proposed by external partners. Encouraging upskilling ensures a common language, smoother exchange, and prepares your teams with the expertise they need to understand and apply more iterative and agile innovation practices.
When applied long term, upskilling sustains innovation, fostering and harnessing a new, more open and collaborative corporate culture.
Cultivate innovation and grow talent to reap success
Innovation is a vast landscape filled with limitless possibilities to cultivate and develop. Fusing internal and open strategies into a hybrid approach creates fertile ground where opportunities take root and flourish.
Including your teams who know everything about what makes the business tick is a direct path to innovation. But it also engages them, unifies, strengthens the corporate culture, retains talent and creates a context conducive to sustainable engagement. These are the first visible sprouts of innovation culture based on more agility and collective intelligence. It is the ultimate solution for understanding the needs at the grass roots.
By integrating a wider ecosystem, the organisation spurs the development of new ideas and learns to modulate the involvement of internal teams to successfully see projects through.
If you aim to reap ideas, retain top talent, or engage with exceptional external minds, this well-orchestrated approach—empowered by the right tools—transforms ambition into lasting strategic momentum. That’s when innovation transforms into a thriving future for the company.
Find out more about hybrid innovation:
- « The Hybrid Innovation Model: Merging Corporate Strength And Startup Agility » Forbes, Greg Ombach, April 2023
CEO & Co-Founder Yumana
