Open innovation consulting is the work of deciding which innovation problems a company should solve with people outside it, partners, suppliers, startups, universities and its own customers, and which it should keep in house. It is a sourcing decision, not a business model. Vivaldi has advised on where innovation comes from since 1999, for companies including Coca-Cola, Takeda, McDonald’s, Hershey’s and American Express.
- Since 1999growth and innovation strategy
- 200+published case studies
- 10 officeson four continents
- 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
When companies bring us in
- The internal pipeline keeps producing variations on what the company already sells, and leadership suspects the limit is the source of ideas rather than the process.
- A partnership, accelerator relationship or university tie-up exists on paper and has produced nothing the business has shipped.
- R&D is being asked to cut cost at the same time as it is being asked to widen its range, and something has to come from outside.
- Someone has proposed buying an innovation platform or running a public challenge, and nobody can say what question it would answer.
- Two business units are approaching the same external partner with different briefs and no shared criteria.
Why most open innovation programs stall
The usual failure is not a shortage of partners. It is that the company goes outside before it can say what it is looking for.
A corporate open innovation program typically starts with the mechanism: a scouting unit, a challenge platform, a startup day, a memorandum with a research institute. Those mechanisms all assume a brief. When the brief is vague, and it usually is, the external party fills the gap with whatever it already wanted to build. The company then evaluates proposals against criteria it is writing as it reads them. Most of what comes back is interesting and none of it is adoptable.
The second failure is about where the result lands. An externally sourced idea arrives with no internal owner, no line in anyone’s plan and no budget holder whose numbers improve if it works. It is reviewed favorably and quietly dropped. This is why open innovation output so often dies between a successful pilot and a product roadmap.
Both failures are decided before the first partner conversation. That is where we work.
What our open innovation consulting services include
1. The make or source decision
We take the innovation agenda and separate it into problems the company can specify and problems it cannot, then cross that against where the capability actually sits. Only one of the resulting quadrants is a genuine open innovation case. Naming the other three saves more money than any partnership adds.
2. Outside-in demand research
Where the problem is not yet specifiable, the outside we go to first is the customer, not a startup. Our DemandFirst research works from the demand side in, mapping what people are trying to get done and where the current category fails them. For Coca-Cola, Takeda, Del Monte and McDonald’s that research produced innovation platforms, meaning defined territories for ideation, which is what a partner brief needs before it can be written.
3. The partner brief and the selection criteria
A brief that states the problem, the constraints, what the company will supply, and what a good answer has to prove. Selection criteria agreed with the people who will have to adopt the result, written down before anyone is shortlisted, so that evaluation is not retrofitted to the proposals in front of you.
4. Collaboration design
What each side contributes, what each side keeps, how value is shared, and the decision gates at which the collaboration continues or ends. We work on the commercial and strategic shape of the arrangement. The contracting and the intellectual property instruments themselves belong with your legal counsel, and we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
5. Landing the result inside the business
Before a partner starts, we name the internal owner, the budget line the result will enter, and the decision the company will take when it works. Co-creation workshops with the receiving teams, a method we have used on engagements for Wacom and Small Luxury Hotels of the World, keep the eventual answer something those teams recognize as theirs.
Can you specify the problem?
Does the capability sit inside the company?
Not sure which quadrant your innovation agenda is in?
Start with a working session with one of our partners. We will take the three initiatives you were about to take outside and sort them against the two axes above.
How an open innovation engagement works
- Sort. We inventory the innovation agenda and place each item against problem definition and internal capability. The output is a short list of what genuinely belongs outside, and an explicit list of what does not.
- Specify. For the items that qualify, demand-side research and internal interviews turn a direction into a problem statement a third party can answer. The output is a brief with constraints and success criteria attached.
- Select. Criteria agreed with the adopting teams, a mapped field of candidate partners, and a structured evaluation. The output is a recommendation with the trade-offs written down, not a shortlist to admire.
- Land. Collaboration shape, decision gates, the internal owner and the budget line the result enters. The output is an arrangement that has somewhere to go when it succeeds.
Why companies choose Vivaldi for open innovation
We are a strategy firm. We do not sell innovation platform software, we do not run accelerators or incubators, and we do not operate challenge programs on your behalf. That is a real limit and it is also the reason the advice is usable: there is no mechanism we need you to buy.
Our starting point is demand rather than technology. Most open innovation offers begin with a supply of external parties and look for somewhere to apply them. Our work on category and demand structure for clients including Coca-Cola, Takeda, Del Monte and McDonald’s starts from what customers are trying to get done, which is what tells you whether the missing capability is worth sourcing at all.
We also tell clients when the answer is no. A large share of what arrives labeled as an open innovation opportunity is work the company should do itself, and saying so early is worth more than a well-run partner search.
How to evaluate an open innovation consultant
- Ask what they will tell you to keep in house. A consultant whose answer is always “go outside” is describing their own business model, not yours.
- Ask whether they are paid by any party on the other side of the table: a platform, a startup network, an accelerator. Ask it directly.
- Ask who writes the selection criteria and when. If the answer is “after we see the proposals”, the evaluation is decoration.
- Ask what happens on the day the pilot succeeds. If there is no named internal owner and no budget line, the program is a research exercise.
- Ask them to describe the engagement without the words ecosystem or platform. If nothing is left, the offer is a mechanism rather than a decision.
Open innovation consultancy vs innovation platform vendor vs corporate accelerator?
| Criterion | Open innovation consultancy | Innovation platform vendor | Corporate accelerator or venture arm |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it decides | Which problems to source outside, from whom, and on what terms | Nothing. It supplies the software that collects and routes submissions | Which external ventures to fund, support or acquire |
| Typical deliverables | Make or source assessment, partner brief, selection criteria, collaboration design | A portal, a challenge workflow, submission analytics | A cohort, investment theses, pilot agreements |
| Who signs it off | The head of innovation or strategy with the business unit that will adopt the result | Innovation operations or IT | Corporate development and the CFO |
| What it assumes | Nothing. The first question is whether to go outside at all | That you already know what to ask the outside world | That the opportunity is a company rather than a capability |
| Best when | The innovation agenda is unsorted and partnerships are producing activity rather than products | The brief and the criteria are settled and the volume of submissions is the constraint | The company wants equity exposure to the capability, not just access to it |
Related services
Open innovation answers where an idea comes from. Four neighboring questions are answered elsewhere, and keeping them apart is most of what makes an innovation agenda legible.
- Innovation strategy owns the portfolio and its governance: how much is bet, on what horizons, and who decides.
- Product and service innovation owns which products and services to create.
- Growth strategy owns where growth comes from in the first place.
- Innovation playbook owns the repeatable method, so innovation does not restart from zero each time.
- Business model innovation owns whether the way the company makes money has to change.
Open innovation is also frequently confused with our ecosystem work, and the distinction matters. Digital ecosystem design defines the participant model and governance of a multi-company system. Platform strategy covers platform business models. Interaction field modelling treats the firm as a field of interactions among many parties. Those three change what the business is. Open innovation changes where its ideas come from, and a company can practice it without becoming an ecosystem of any kind. All five sit under growth and innovation consulting.
Open innovation consulting in the US and worldwide
We work from 10 offices on four continents, with the practice concentrated in New York and across our European and Asian offices. Open innovation questions are rarely confined to one market: the capability a US business unit wants to source often already exists inside a sister company, a regional supplier or a university two countries away, and the first useful map is usually the internal one.
For multinationals the recurring problem is three regions approaching the same category of partner with three different briefs. We work with central innovation functions and regional teams together so that the criteria are shared even where the partners are not.
Sort your innovation agenda before you go looking for partners
Bring us the initiatives you were planning to take outside. We will tell you which of them genuinely belong there, and what the brief has to say before anyone is approached.