Many companies have adopted open innovation as an important approach.
Open innovation emphasizes drawing on external resources — such as customers, startups, crowdsourcing platforms, and universities — to develop ideas for new products and services.
Companies often adopt open innovation to access a wider pool of ideas and expertise, reduce costs, mitigate risks, gain a competitive advantage by leveraging diverse perspectives, and ultimately bring new products and service to market faster by collaborating with external partners and talent.
There is a spectrum of approaches to open innovation:
Outbound
Where a company co-develops their ideas and technologies with outsiders, inbound and hybrid.
Inbound
Using external innovation resources, such as information networking, and crowdsourcing
Hybrid
Combinations of outbound and inbound.
Over 20 years, ICatalysts has worked with companies on all approaches. For example, in an outbound innovation project, our team worked with Avery Dennison, a Fortune 500 ® specialty chemical company, to co-create a circularity system with their customers to implement a supply chain innovation to close the loop on and recover label waste. Another example is where we collaborated with JD Power to develop a quantitative sustainability awards system for consumer products.
We have many examples of inbound innovation projects. For example, through our Empower Innovation partnership, member companies including EDF Renewables, SK Gas, Southern California Edison and many other large companies source technology and startups to partner with. Empower Innovation and other software platforms and marketplaces are used by about 40% of companies for open innovation according to an Economist report.
Our services include:
Crowdsourcing
Technology Scouting
Program Assessment & Roadmapping
Charrettes & Roundtabling
Special Projects & Research
Since 2013, we have partnered with the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship as part of the World’s largest student startup competition to train and connect almost 500 startups created in the top university labs worldwide with more than 80 companies and leading investors including many of America’s largest companies. Overall, these startups have raised over $5.5B. Other university and corporate collaborations we have supported have been at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan and the University of Washington.
To support engagements, we tap our database of 35,000+ contacts nationwide working in technology and innovation in all sectors and industries. These contacts are at startups and small businesses, large and medium-sized companies, universities, angel, VC and corporate investors, accelerators and incubators, and the public sector (e.g., cities, states, federal government).
To help meet specific client needs, we often tap our network of experts including industry experts, technologists and university professors.
Featured Projects
- Conducted research and made recommendations on green lending and sustainability policy and governance.
- Made corporate executive level presentations.
- Led $25M in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) engagements, creating policy, digital solutions, and sustainability initiatives to meet corporate and regulatory standards.
- Built a $20M software platform to manage environmental, health and safety programs nationwide.
- Coached and supported corporate staff developing a plan for a digital manufacturing support business.
- Coached and supported corporate staff developing a plan for hydroponics products to grow food.
- Led corporate Superfund (toxic site cleanup) strategy to identify new technologies and strategies to address the company’s liabilities.
- Developed a business plan to create a new JD Power Award system for household cleaning products based on the life cycle impacts of products.
- Developed a circularity policy and pilot program for the Corporate VP of Marketing to reclaim adhesive waste, enhancing sustainability and customer loyalty.
- Led training, mentoring and coaching of hundreds of entrepreneurs in 16 African countries as part of the Bank’s $1M annual African Entrepreneurship Award prize competition.