Best Open Innovation practice 2023

In November 2023, Veerle De Colvenaer & Piet Verhoeve received the Best Open innovation practice award at the World Open Innovation Conference in Bilbao for its exceptional originality, and novel methods to create stronger collaboration between academia and industry to tackle challenges in funded projects.

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WHat is it about?

The study identifies and addresses five critical sources of failure in multi stakeholder collaborations and proposal writing, including differing paces, divergent perspectives, over reliance on digital communication, template overload, and opportunistic funding behavior. A novel methodology, based on canvas-driven workshops and strategic questioning, is introduced to prevent these failures and enhance collaboration. The methodology's effectiveness is demonstrated through real-life workshops with healthcare consortia, leading to improved alignment, communication, and trust among partners. While the impact on proposal success rates is pending, positive feedback and adoption by other organizations highlight its value in fostering successful collaborative innovation. The study emphasizes the importance of early engagement with end-users for market adoption.

Why the Award?

This Best Practice stood out for its originality, fostering collaboration between academia and industry to tackle challenges in building funded collaboration projects.

The initiative demonstrated remarkable results, impact on a large scale, serving as a model for the broader Open Innovation community

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Who

Piet Verhoeve

Origanius

Veerle De Colvenaer

Efika Sciences

FOR WHOM?

Specially designed for Innovators, R&D Professionals and Researchers

that want to go for innovation projects that deliver results

What are the key driving forces for failure?

Based on many years of experience in multistakeholder collaboration formation and support for accessing public funding, we identified five driving sources of failure in both the collaboration on-set and the inherent proposal writing:

Differing Paces and Priorities: Partners do not move at the same pace. Some partners free up time and capacity to write and launch a project, whereas for others other core activities get prioritized.
Divergent Perspectives: Partners enter the consortium and concept formation with different stakes and expectations leading to misalignment of the project topics, objectives, and approach.
Overreliance on Digital Communication: In a hybrid, post-corona decade, the believe exists that all discussions can be held online.
Template Overload and Lack of Vision: Often 1 person dives into the proposal templates and holds the pen. Without attention for the overall story line and bigger picture of the proposal, writing activities are divided amongst people on virtual platforms, leading to incoherent proposals.
Opportunistic funding behavior: The idea is not need or market driven, but as there is an opportunity for funding, a lead partner composes a consortium and submits a proposal.