The Unexpected ROI of Open Innovation Portals
Open Innovation leaders at Unilever, Mondelēz, PepsiCo, and Colgate-Palmolive sit down with yet2 and discuss how to leverage Open Innovation Portals as part of a larger innovation strategy. The panelists highlight the unexpected benefits from Open Innovation Portals, including:
Increase Visibility of Innovation Challenges
Jos Tissen, Open Innovation Manager, Foods & Refreshment at Unilever, discusses how Unilever leverages the portal to showcase their innovation needs. When discussing Unilever’s R&D and Sustainability challenges on the portal, Jos remarks Unilever’s innovation goals are so grand that collaboration with external parties becomes really important, and “if you think you can do it alone, then you’re not thinking big enough.”
Protection from IP Contamination
Paula Angeli, Open Innovation Senior Group Leader LA at Mondelēz, explains how before setting up the portal, executives regularly received emails from external parties containing confidential information, putting the organization at risk of IP contamination. “Being such a big company, we are always [a] target of those emails to our C-levels,” says Paula, “this is one of the main reasons why we chose to have external portal managed by yet2, to avoid this kind of thing… It’s very common.” The portal and third-party filtering now ensures all confidential information is removed before being shared with Mondelēz.
Benefits of Third-party Filtering
Sameer Talsania, Senior Manager of R&D External Innovation at PepsiCo, comments on the unexpected benefits of having a third-party manage and filter submissions. In addition to supporting the PepsiCo Open Innovation portal, “we’ve used yet2 to redirect traffic to our PepsiCo Greenhouse Accelerator,” says Sameer, “but then on the back-end also yet2 helped us with filtering the submissions and triaging the top candidates that entered that program.”
Brigette Wolf, Head of SnackFutures Innovation at Mondelēz, joins briefly as well to discuss how Mondelēz has a second Open Innovation portal that they use for Mondelēz SnackFutures’ new accelerator program, CoLab. “We’ve had some great success of seeing the power and simplicity of collaborating with yet2, to be able to filter and be really clear with what our needs are, and then finding those right startups that we’d like to engage with for our needs,” explains Brigette.
Access to Valuable, Non-obvious Opportunities
Laurence Du-Thumm, Director of External Technology Innovation at Colgate-Palmolive, discusses one of the unexpected benefits of the portal is being able to receive technology submissions for one category, but then being open and collaborative by working with submitters to further co-develop their technology for new applications. Laurence explains they recently received “a submission from a company in the skincare space and [Colgate-Palmolive is] looking at it and working with them on something for an application for oral care.”
4 Key Criteria for OI Portal Success
And Marcus Widell, Director at yet2, shares insights on the four key components that yet2 identifies that organizations must execute well to run a successful Open Innovation Portal: actively promoting the portal, setting strict filtering criteria, efficient triaging of the most promising opportunities, and building strong internal relationships.
You can view each of these companies’ Open Innovation Portals here.
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