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A New Approach to Accelerating Corporate Innovation
In today’s dynamic economic climate, innovation has become a business imperative. But how can organizations foster innovation? Like entrepreneurship, innovation requires a context of engagement and interconnection between people, stakeholders, and ecosystems to flourish — in other words, an innovation ecosystem. This approach encourages organizations to align and partner with other stakeholders in their ecosystem to ideate and realize innovations in response to problems and solutions in the environment.
Find out more about building an innovation ecosystem from Fiona Murray, Faculty Director in the Corporate Innovation online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Transcript
Building an innovation ecosystem
Innovation ecosystems are hotspots of highly concentrated innovation activity, which have a significant density of resources, talent, funding, infrastructure, and demand. They have a highly supportive innovation culture and they have highly engaged stakeholders: entrepreneurs, universities, risk capital providers, large corporations, and governments.
What is an innovation ecosystem approach?
An innovation ecosystem approach is about selecting a small number of innovation hotspots around the world, and really focusing open innovation on those key places. Because it is a location based approach, it means being deeply immersed in a few specific places rather than spread thin worldwide. Today’s shift to an innovation ecosystem approach actually simplifies and focuses open innovation and when done effectively, it can also help drive a transformation and internal innovation.
For corporate leaders and executives, it’s important first to realise that innovation has evolved, as you say, from closed through open to now the ecosystem approach to reckon with the way that innovation is working in the world today. In the past, a corporate could just put money into sponsored research or into M&A activity, but now it’s a much broader spectrum of innovation activity they need to be engaging with. Leaders have to decide how they change their own internal organization to actually be able to engage with the ecosystem effectively. So there’s quite a bit for leaders to do.
Six key questions for leaders
So the key questions for leaders as they think about an effective innovation ecosystem are:
What locations are they going to use as the core of that innovation ecosystem approach? Is it a location you’re already in or one or more new locations?
What do you want from the innovation ecosystems for your organization?
What do you have to offer these various stakeholders, especially the startup entrepreneurs?
What do you have to offer the stakeholders in these specific innovation ecosystems?
What are the mechanisms you will use to engage the stakeholders in this ecosystem?
How will you redesign the internal system and processes of your organization in order to make the most of your ecosystem interactions?
So Phil, that’s a really helpful list. Thank you for sharing that with us.