Over the past six months, yet2 has been running open innovation (OI) training for three large clients. Each client brought unique challenges, with different industry focuses, OI maturity levels, and team dynamics. Taken together, these training sessions have surfaced important insights about the future and impact of OI training. Today, we’re sharing three key shifts in how companies are working with external partners, building alignment across functions, and using training as a strategic tool.
Flexibly tailoring the training to meet your needs
yet2’s full OI training consists of eight four-hour modules that explore a wide range of topics relevant to external innovation. While we’ve run several client cohorts through all 8 modules, we’ve seen a recent uptick this year in new OI Training clients requesting semi-custom training to match their priorities, and we’re happy to adjust accordingly. For example, one client already had a strong internal training program led by their legal team for NDAs and patents, so we skipped Modules 3.1 and 3.2.
Instead, they focused on areas like handling disruptive innovation, how to engage external providers, and preparing for negotiations. Another client divided the training across two different teams, adjusting the content for each based on team maturity and focus. This kind of flexibility, both in content and structure, is helping teams stay focused on what’s most relevant and shorten the gap between learning and action.
Senior leadership are actively seeking out opportunities to enhance their OI systems
What happens after the training is more important than the sessions themselves. We’re regularly being asked to share observations with senior leadership and recommendations to improve OI processes, especially around themes such as streamlining NDA processes, setting and communicating a policy around how to handle Disruptive innovation opportunities, and opportunities to accelerate decision-making in early-stage engagement. As facilitators of the training, we see and capture themes and insights throughout and build recommendations jointly with the training team to share with their senior leadership.
In one recent case, we debriefed with a leadership teams upon completion of the training course, sharing insights and learnings to help inform their review of their internal innovation systems. We made recommendations around their NDA template for startups, looked at how teams interpret risk, where decision-making slows down, and what kinds of policy shifts could improve coordination. These sessions are now becoming a formal part of our training engagements, offering a structured opportunity to align insights with leadership priorities.
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Executives are seeking mini, 1-hour trainings on strategic OI topics
Senior leaders are increasingly asking for compact training sessions on similar topics in our full course, but offered in a quarter of the time. These aren’t full modules. They’re short, high-impact formats designed to fit into leadership calendars and spark focused decisions.
At one company, a group of vice presidents was working through how to handle disruptive innovation opportunities internally and optimize for success. We created a 60-minute session on sandboxing strategies used by other large organizations, followed by a 30-minute check-in after the team tested the ideas in practice. The format gave them a concrete starting point and a chance to reflect on early results in real time, while easily fitting into their busy schedules.
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Looking Ahead
These trends point to a larger shift. Open Innovation is continuing to be democratized across the organization. We’re responding by designing our OI Training to not just share best practices, but serve as a tool to disseminate capabilities across teams with senior leadership contributions. It’s becoming a way for teams and leaders to  strengthen how they work with the outside world.
If you’re exploring how to build external innovation capabilities or want to see how this training might look inside your organization, contact us. We’re always happy to share what we’re seeing and help you shape what comes next.
Check out our OI Training page for more information on each module.
Words by Carlos Pichardo
Image by FreePik
