Open Innovation

The keys to a successful open innovation program

Open innovation makes it easier to involve external stakeholders in your innovation strategy. To successfully implement your open innovation approach, you need to think about how you want to integrate your partners into your organization.

There are several elements you need to master to ensure the success of your approach:

• Identify where you want to collaborate with partners: to ensure the success of your approach, identify in advance the areas in which you want to involve your partners. Prioritize those areas where your staff will easily understand the need for an external actor.
• Raise open innovation awareness among your teams: limit the risk of "not invented here" by raising awareness upfront among teams likely to collaborate with external actors.
• Define your approach: identify the stakeholders, framework and governance of your open innovation program. Communicate transparently about the rules to be followed, both internally and externally.
• Choose the right tool: not all innovation management softwares can be used to adopt an open innovation approach. To centralize your innovation management and build bridges with your internal innovation projects, choose a platform like Yumana that can meet your challenges and accurately monitor the ROI of your program.

Step 1: Design your open innovation program

This first stage is crucial: it will determine how you will succeed in open innovation.

Before you start your program, you need to identify the following elements:

• The goals and vision of the open innovation program

  To successfully involve external stakeholders in your internal strategic issues, three elements are essential:

  • Know in advance what you expect from open innovation, so that you can easily identify the areas in which you want to involve your partners;
  • Have a clear vision of what you consider to be a successful collaboration;
  • Share this vision and your objectives internally and externally to ensure that all your stakeholders understand and take ownership of them.

• The governance of the open innovation program

  Define in advance the formal and informal rules that will govern your open innovation approach:

  • Scouting and identification of potential partners;
  • Governance and legal framework to facilitate and accelerate the start of collaboration between corporates and startups;
  • Partner selection stages and criteria shared with all stakeholders;
  • Feedback sharing within the organization on the collaborations established.

  These governance mechanisms need to be defined and shared with your partners.

  To ensure that the various collaborative projects get off the ground, remember that open innovation remains a collaborative and non-delegative approach: your partners innovate with you, not exclusively for you.

• The operating model of the open innovation program

  Integrating new players into your approach can turn your usual working methods on their head:

  • Existing processes on both sides are often very different. To avoid imposing rigid processes on your partners, you need to work together on the different stages of your collaboration.
  • Centralizing the management of your partners means changing practices within your organization. To facilitate the adoption of this new approach, stay flexible: systematize feedback and evolve your operating model towards a truly collaborative approach.

• The KPIs for the open innovation program

  Applications, new partners, ongoing collaborations, POCs, completed projects... These are all important metrics to track in order to monitor your open innovation program. To measure its success, define the key indicators in advance. Share them internally and with your partners, and easily identify the most promising collaborations and the obstacles that need to be overcome.

Step 2: Source the right partners at the right time

You've defined the key elements of your open innovation program. Now it's time to launch your program and source partners in line with your strategy.

How do you find the right partners at the right time?

• 1. Identify the partners your employees have already approached

  Trust your teams! Most of your employees already work with a number of partners. To identify the ideal partners, ask your employees to list the players they work with. With Yumana, you can go one step further and give your teams the opportunity to share their feedback on previous collaborations.

• 2. Choose a partner database integrated into your tool

  There are a number of databases on the market that you can use to search and identify the players that can create synergies for your business. Their weakness? Although they are comprehensive, they require at least the involvement of a technical team to integrate the data into your CRM.

  Yumana's solution is designed to simplify your experience, allowing you to benefit from the richness of an external database directly on your platform, without requiring the intervention of your teams.

• 3. Launch an external challenge to source partners

  Want to broaden your partner base on a specific topic? Organize a challenge to engage external communities on the topic of your choice! Environmental or social innovation, creating products with disruptive technologies, solving business challenges... There are many topics on which you can enlist the help of business partners.

  To facilitate the management of challenges and the integration of winners into your partner repository, Yumana offers you an all-in-one solution designed to manage your partner community from start to finish.

Step 3: Evaluate and select partners in line with your strategy

You now have a substantial pool of potential partners. Before proposing them to your whole company, a selection phase is necessary.

There are several ways to find out if they are in line with your objectives:

• Encourage recommendations and collect feedback

  To get a more complete picture of what your potential partners can bring to the table, prioritize first-hand feedback from your employees. Encourage stakeholders who have worked with particular partners to give their opinion:

  • Did the collaboration go well?
  • Did it bear fruit?
  • Is the partner trustworthy?

  Then encourage your teams to say whether they would recommend the organizations they have worked with, and get an overall view of the quality of your dealflow.

• Set up customized scorecards

  Are the potential partners relevant to your organization? Do they meet your business needs? Will working with them add real value to your teams? Yumana allows you to create personalized scorecards to help you evaluate your deal flow. Your partner repository managers will need to complete these to select the most relevant candidates for your organization.

• Leverage your network of experts

  To assess the relevance of certain potential partners, it is sometimes necessary to involve business experts. With the Yumana platform, you can invite your community of experts to provide feedback on the relevance of a potential partner with just one click. They can then directly evaluate the potential partner against fully customizable criteria that you select or your experts recommend.

Step 4: Start working with external partners

You have selected the partners that meet your company's needs. Before you start innovating together, we strongly advise you to establish a framework that is profitable for both you and your partners.

• 1. Set a framework that benefits everyone

  Intellectual property rights, contractual obligations and technology transfer are important points to consider. Don't underestimate the importance of defining a common framework from which both you and your partners can benefit, in order to avoid obstacles in the future.

  In addition to the legal framework, think about defining the different stages of your collaboration (contractualization, initial testing, approved solution, etc.). By defining this operational process together, you will maximize your chances of establishing a mutually beneficial collaboration. To facilitate this scoping phase, Yumana provides you with a number of dedicated tools:

  • A secure space to store your confidential documents, visible only to authorized personnel;
  • A fully customizable workflow to model the various milestones of your partner relationship within your platform.

• 2. Launch your first collaboration

  Once the framework is in place, it's time to launch your first collaboration. Its prime objective? To innovate by encouraging knowledge sharing that benefits both you and your partners. This collaboration can take many forms:

  • Ideation challenges
  • Joint R&D projects
  • Co-development
  • Technology transfer, etc.

  With the Yumana Suite, you benefit from a range of tools to ensure fruitful collaboration with your partners.

  Your employees can directly involve the relevant partners in their projects. External stakeholders are included in the collaborative workspace and have access to all the information and tools they need to collaborate successfully.

Step 5: Accelerate the impact of open innovation in your organization

Your employees have started their first collaborations with the partners in your repository. How can you increase the impact of open innovation in your organization tenfold? What steps do you need to take to achieve this?

• Manage and measure the results of the POCs launched

  Before validating a concept, it is necessary to test its relevance and impact on your organization. Collaborations with external partners typically go through a POC (proof of concept) phase, which is dedicated to assessing the added value of a project under development. To ensure the success of a POC, the Yumana Suite allows you to track its progress and integrate milestones, also known as stage gates, which act as checkpoints as the project progresses. This means that you can easily monitor the progress of projects in collaboration with external stakeholders and intervene with the various teams when necessary.

• Encourage co-operation between your business units and partners

  Do your teams have projects they want to launch but are unable to do so due to a lack of internal resources? Encourage them to collaborate with your partners! Make your platform the central point of exchange between your organization and your external ecosystem. By encouraging your teams to use your platform whenever they're looking for an innovative solution from outside your company, you can centralize all collaborations and more easily manage the results of your open innovation strategy. With Yumana, you can track the progress of collaborations between your units and your partners. At a glance, you can identify and reward the most dynamic entities. In this way, you can motivate the rest of your organization to adopt open innovation as a performance accelerator.