Open innovation: the real challenge is to develop and capitalise on skills
Open innovation is now a widespread practice: 86 per cent of large companies have adopted it, recognising its value in terms of access to external knowledge and collaboration. Corporate accelerators, innovation hubs and ecosystem initiatives have proliferated. But quantity alone is not enough to build a structured and systematic capacity for open innovation: these initiatives still struggle to align with business objectives, and their results remain difficult to measure. Organisational resistance, a lack of vision and strategic alignment, and absent or inadequate incentives for collaboration: these are signs that a culture of open innovation has yet to be widely adopted and consolidated.
This is where skills come into play. Open innovation is not just about gaining access to ideas and technologies that the company does not possess. It is also a learning process: identifying external knowledge and technologies, building partnerships, and managing intellectual property. It means learning to work with different stakeholders, areas of expertise and ways of thinking, and integrating these contributions into the organisation’s processes and skills.
In this context, training is a key driver. This is demonstrated by the experience of the ‘Executive Master’s in Open Innovation & Intellectual Property’, which Luiss Business School has been running since 2015 in collaboration with SAA School of Management and the University of Turin, and with the support of the Directorate-General for Industrial Property – Italian Patent and Trademark Office of the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italia. A hotbed of expertise, we recently celebrated its tenth anniversary with an alumni reunion and have ‘measured’ its impact through a study that assessed its effects on three levels: individual, organisational and ecosystemic. The analysis involved graduates from the nine completed cohorts, focusing on their skills, careers and contributions to innovation within their organisations and in innovation ecosystems. The tenth cohort, which was ongoing at the time of the survey, was examined separately to identify emerging trends.
The results speak for themselves: alumni report being better prepared across the board. Management of innovative processes and technology transfer, protection and commercialisation of intellectual property, securing funding for innovation, business plans for research and development, and patent search tools: the average self-assessed score has risen from 2.6 to 3.8 on a scale of one to five, representing a 48 per cent increase. On the same scale, the propensity to propose innovative projects has risen from 3.1 to 4.2 (+31 per cent). And the proportion of those leading teams working on these projects has grown from 29 per cent to 42 per cent.
When it comes to corporate innovation processes, the innovation initiatives to which alumni report contributing increase by 28 per cent within organisations and by 40 per cent within ecosystems following completion of the Master’s programme. This is the result of a multidisciplinary education, which fosters dialogue between research, business and institutions, equips students to manage partnerships, and develops the ability to transform knowledge into professional opportunities.
