Most open innovation teams put a lot of energy into finding partners: scouting startups, mapping technology providers and engaging in ecosystems. This week’s three stories suggest that’s rarely where things get stuck.
At Scania, Tony Sandberg’s Pilot Partner team only starts a pilot when a customer brings a problem, and they pay for it. That rule took the team from 1 person to 50 pilots, and one of them changed Scania’s strategy.
In a Novum challenge call, a one-person open innovation team asked five peers why business units only ask her for suppliers. Their advice: deliver the supplier, then ask about the problem underneath.
And six consumer goods rivals, from AB InBev to Unilever, share the results of every startup pilot they run. They can trust each other’s results because every pilot has one owner that defined the problem, paid for the pilot and judged the result.
Three settings, one pattern. Get the problem and its owner right, and finding the partner gets a lot easier.
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
From 1 Person to 50 Pilots: Scania’s Speedboat Team
Scania’s Pilot Partner team runs every pilot with a paying customer and partners who share the risk. One pilot put hundreds of electric buses on São Paulo’s streets. Another, a truck Scania first didn’t want to build, changed its strategy.
A cruise ship carries thousands of passengers in comfortable cabins. As the ship is so big, turning, speeding up, or braking takes a long time. Its captain therefore has to set the route far in advance.
Tony Sandberg, Vice President of Scania Pilot Partner, uses the picture of a big cruise ship to describe the 135-year-old company Scania. Its lean, customer-first operation is built for steady improvement, so it can forecast what customers will need next year and the year after. Beyond those two years, the forecasts get much weaker. Electrification, connectivity, and automated driving are bringing new players into trucking, which creates more possible combinations of technology and business models than anyone can predict.
Five years ago, Scania set up a small team to act as the ship’s speedboats to go ahead of the ship and report back what it sees. In real life, the team called Pilot Partner, tests new trucks and buses with paying customers before Scania commits to them. Suppliers, integrators, and infrastructure partners help build and run each pilot, sharing the risk with Scania.
In São Paulo, local partners helped Scania put an electric bus into service within 12 months, after which the operator bought 400. In Germany, a truck Scania first turned down for DHL is now changing the company’s strategy. According to Tony, both pilots worked for the same reasons: a real customer problem, partners who shared the risk, and trust between them.
Behind Every Supplier Request, Look for the Problem
If business units only ask your open innovation team for suppliers, they are showing you what they think your team is for. Changing that starts with which requests you take on, and what you ask after you deliver.
“I need to find a new supplier for a grinding wheel. Can you find it?”
Requests like this keep reaching the open innovation team of a global precision manufacturer. The team has one person, an Open Innovation Specialist, who launched its services this year. Other units ask her for a humanoid robot supplier, or a machine that produces tubes.
The requests make sense. The business units develop 80 to 90% of their work in-house, and before the team existed, outside help usually meant a local supplier someone already knew. But the partnerships the team exists for, with startups and universities, start from problems the business can’t solve alone. Few of those reach her.
In a Novum challenge call, she asked five open innovation peers how to change that.
AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, Colgate-Palmolive and Mondelēz run one startup accelerator together.
In Colombia, most of AB InBev’s beer goes into reusable bottles. Cleaning the equipment on its production lines normally takes large amounts of hot water and harsh chemicals. EW Tech, a Bogotá startup, developed a process that cleans and disinfects them with salt, water and electricity. Its pilot at a smaller regional brewery cut water use in the cleaning process by 80% and washing time by 50%. AB InBev then scaled the technology to its largest brewery in the country, which produces nearly 40% of Colombia’s beer.
That pilot ran through the 100+ Accelerator, which AB InBev launched in 2018. Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Danone, Mondelēz International and Unilever have since joined as partners, and the program has supported about 190 startups in more than 40 countries. Each year, the program picks 30 to 40 startups from thousands of applicants. In the first two cohorts, more than half of the startups signed long-term contracts with AB InBev.
Sharing only works if each company trusts results it didn’t produce. The program builds that trust before a startup applies: one partner defines the problem, pays for the pilot, staffs it and judges the result. Only then does the result go to the other five.
What’s happening @ Novum
How can organizations move beyond innovation activities and build a system that consistently delivers meaningful outcomes?
On Nov 24th we’ll explore how to better align innovation ambitions with organizational capabilities and turn innovation efforts into measurable outcomes with Dennis Böcker (former Global IoT Innovation Lead at Bosch). Drawing on a real-world example from a German family-owned MedTech company, Dennis will share how assessing innovation maturity can reveal gaps in strategic direction, portfolio management, capabilities, ownership, and resources. We'll discuss how these insights can inform sharper strategic decisions, connect priorities to resources, and help build an Innovation Management System that delivers results consistently.
Curious to join this discussion about innovation management systems? Join the Novum Society - check this page for more info.
This week was about where partnerships start. Next week is about where ideas should end, and who gets to make that decision.
Reckitt hands the first cut to consumers, Microsoft shows how a small number on a review slide can kill a big idea, and Telefónica splits the responsibility across four roles.
Hans
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
PS- have an story to share in a future edition? Curious to hear from you… hit reply and tell me more.
