When to Use Both OI Portals & Proactive Scouting

Final of three part series where we answer the question, "Which is best: Proactive Scouting or OI Portals?"
Words By Marcus Widell |

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When to Use Both OI Portals & Proactive Scouting: image of blue luminous diamonds rising from below in a darkened space with layers of blue virtual appearing walls and a cityscape at night in the background and a luminous blue white magnifying glass icon centeredAs providers of both Proactive Technology Scouting services and Open Innovation Portals, we often get asked when to use each approach. In this series, We highlight some of the benefits of using each and explore the non-obvious synergies. Here we discuss how they compliment each other, and create a holistic approach to accelerating innovation.

When to Use Both OI Portals and Proactive Technology Scouting

While not all yet2’s clients use both open innovation portals and proactive scouting, almost 80% of our portal clients do leverage yet2’s proactive technology scouting services, in parallel on the same technology scouting topic.

When Portal Submissions Drive Scouting Strategy

OI Portals are an excellent tool to attract submissions in non-obvious technology categories, industries, or application areas. By casting a wide net and broadcasting needs through an OI portal, yet2 clients receive ideas and technologies that they otherwise might not think of as potential solutions to their needs. While these submissions themselves may or may not be the exact solution to their need, they do bring to light additional categories or industries that can serve as new inputs into a proactive scouting strategy. For example, we recently ran a project for a client looking for novel cooling technologies and posted the need on their OI Portal and proactively scouted. One of the more interesting submissions to the portal was a magnetic cooling technology. This led the scouting team to do a deep dive into this technology area and identify additional, promising targets for yet2’s client to consider.

Keeping Your Finger on the Pulse on Core but Strategic Technology Need Areas

Many of our clients have on-going need areas where they are interested in continuously identifying new and novel technologies and companies. Often these are core technology need areas for our clients, but it’s not confidential that the client would be scouting in these categories. These topics are particularly attractive for using a scouting strategy that leverages both OI portals and proactive scouting. Example topic areas include: sugar replacement technologies for food and beverage companies, novel transdermal or oral delivery mechanisms for personal care companies, sustainable packaging for consumer packaged goods companies, and more. The OI Portal serves as an always-open entry point for external companies to bring their technologies to the host company’s attention. Since these needs are usually core to the organization, our clients also want to ensure they’re proactively scouting in parallel to increase the odds of finding the right solutions.

Validating Knowledge of All Possibilities

Lastly, we see clients use both OI portals and proactive scouting as part of their search strategy when they want to be certain they explored all possibilities. This may be in scenarios where our clients have already identified a lead candidate and they want to know they’re choosing the right one. Other times, clients want to increase the odds of finding that perfect solution, particularly in topic areas where potential solutions could come from a wide range of industries and technology categories. Combining an open innovation portal with proactive scouting ensures they opened every possible channel.

This concludes our three-part blog series on OI Portals vs. Proactive Technology Scouting. As we highlighted in Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series, there are times when it’s clear when you should leverage an OI Portal or when you should turn to proactive technology scouting, and sometimes it makes sense to use them both.

If you have a current Need and you’re not sure which approach to use, contact us to continue the discussion and we can help advise.

 

Photo Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay & Search by il Capitano from NounProject.com


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