When to Use Open Innovation Portals

Part one of three where we answer the question, "Which is best: Proactive Scouting or OI Portals?"

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As providers of both proactive technology scouting services and open innovation portals, we often get asked when to use each approach. In the next series of posts, we’ll highlight some of the benefits of using each and explore the non-obvious synergies. Here, we begin with how Open Innovation Portals create possibility.

When to Use Open Innovation Portals

An open innovation portal is a public-facing, branded platform integrated into your corporate website experience. yet2 builds, hosts, and manages portals for many leading companies that leverage portals as their innovation gateway to reach their audiences and customers. There are many benefits to using open innovation portals, and we highlight just a few below:

Be Seen Publicly as a “Partner of Choice” to Startups and External Organizations

One key benefit of employing an open innovation portal as part of your innovation strategy is to announce your organization’s commitment to innovation and to be seen as a partner of choice. In a time where promising startups and technology companies have their choice of potential partners to engage with, an OI portal is an excellent way to stand out from your competitors and present yourself as an attractive partner for startups and technology companies.

Promote Non-Strategic Needs and Catch Promising Solutions

A second is that OI portals are excellent tools to promote core, non-strategic and non-confidential innovation need areas for your organization and solicit submissions across both your and yet2’s networks. In a given year, a client’s portal will receive several hundred submissions, with several submissions promising enough to move into resourced evaluations and eventually deals. A yet2-managed OI portal helps client teams identify attracting opportunities they may otherwise miss, while the yet2 team handles the day-to-day management of the portal on the client’s behalf.

Protect Your Organization from IP Contamination

A third key benefit is that OI portals serve as a centralized place to ingest all external ideas and technologies submitted into your organization. Combined with yet2 submission management service, portals are an effective “airlock” to protect your organization from receiving unsolicited, confidential information and protect your organization against IP contamination. yet2′s dedicated OI portal team will review every submission filtering out the useless or dangerous, handle all communications with submitters, scrub all submissions to remove confidential information, and share only the most promising submissions with the client team for review.

OI Portals are just one tool our client’s use as part of their Open Innovation strategies. In our blog coming next week, we’ll dive into some of the scenarios when its best to leverage Proactive Technology Scouting.

Download our OI Portal information sheet to learn more about yet2 OI Portals, case studies, and hear what our clients have to say.

Contact us to learn more.

Want more? Read the next part in this series, “When to Use Proactive Scouting

 

Photo Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay


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