This blog post is part of a series on successfully managing open innovation programs. In this series, I talk with experienced innovation managers to understand how they've built an open innovation capability in their organizations and how they strive to make this capability increasingly stronger.
Here, having an open innovation capability refers to mastering the ability to successfully combine internal knowledge and resources with external ones to create something new. There are many flavors of open innovation and three general ways of getting it done. At HYPE, we categorize the different flavors by the main type of stakeholder that is engaged. The big picture looks roughly like this:
In this post, we dive into open innovation with researchers and explore why pooling academic insights through online collaboration platforms can help entire scientific fields move forward at an increased speed.
Innovating with researchers is pursued for a variety of reasons. Asking researchers to answer online calls for proposals, participate in projects, or contribute to hackathons and other ideation exercises can result in rapid solution finding, valuable exchanges, and generally, a more accurate mapping of capabilities on both the organizer and participant side.
In the long run, it can result in joint publications or "twin wins." Twin wins can better serve society as they help advance basic as well as applied science. For example, in terms of rapid solution finding, NASA's attempt to crowdsource with researchers (mainly non-domain experts) "was particularly successful in the challenge of predicting dangerous solar storms, where it produced a breakthrough within a mere three months," (source: HBR). However, this method's drawback was that resident experts saw "open-source methods as a fundamental challenge to their professional identities." Just like any mode of open innovation, accepting the results is deeply influenced by culture.
Researcher open innovation can also be employed to help alleviate social problems. In the UK, BAXI Heating engaged with leading academics from Coventry University to address a pressing social issue in the United Kingdom: fuel poverty. In the US, the National Science Foundation (NSF) gathered 200 education representatives to discuss how to engage more underrepresented minorities in STEM research.
These examples illustrate that open innovation with researchers represents an excellent vehicle for technology transfer and social impact creation alike.
To learn more about how building a dedicated open innovation program can facilitate scientific research, I talked to Moritz Fontaine, Discovery & Preparation Officer and Innovation Manager at the European Space Agency.
Fontaine also shared how the Open Space Innovation Platform makes ESA's mission more accessible to space researchers, industry experts, and space enthusiasts in Europe.
Headquartered in Paris and with major sites across Europe, ESA is a true European organization with 22 Member States. Its missions range from Earth observation satellites that support climate change research and agriculture or disaster management to probes that analyze distant planets. Examples of ESA's work include BepiColombo, Europe's first mission to Mercury, and the Cheops telescope, which searches for planets around nearby stars. ESA is also an active member of the International Space Station community.
ESA headquarters in Paris, France (credit: ESA)
ESA conducts research and development in all fields in the upstream and downstream sectors. As such, the organization is working closely with Europe-based industry and academia to find the best solutions for the most challenging space-related questions. The organization has long embraced open innovation, which has proven a source of immense advantage.
As of 2020, ESA restructured its "Basic Activities" into three elements, representing three types of innovation efforts: Discovery, Preparation, and Technology Development. These efforts range from early blue-sky research to discovery projects and are at the beginning of ESA's seamless innovation chain.
In this blog post, we will focus solely on the Discovery projects, which arise from different sources, including calls for ideas from internal and external stakeholders. ESA effectively designed Discovery projects to create paradigm shifts – these are the projects that beckoned the creation of the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP).
ESA implemented OSIP as a unique tool for the Discovery element of its Basic Activities to involve external partners more actively in its innovation efforts. The goal was to simplify and streamline the entry point for industry, academia, and research organizations to work together with ESA.
In addition to the ESA Discovery team implementing OSIP, other programs and directorates also use the platform to run calls for ideas. Since launching publicly in spring 2019, OSIP has grown considerably and has seen encouraging results. "This has worked really well," Fontaine said. "We are delighted with the response to OSIP from our colleagues, and many have run interesting calls that have picked up lots of interesting ideas."
More importantly, the platform has also started to generate a strong community. "We are aiming to build and nurture a community of space technology enthusiasts that enables external partners to collaborate with ESA to contribute to the future of space," Fontaine said.
"We are aiming to build and nurture a community of space technology enthusiasts that enables external partners to collaborate with ESA to contribute to the future of space," - Moritz Fontaine, ESA.
The first step in setting up a platform for collective intelligence capturing and sharing, such as OSIP, was to find an appropriate audience and to connect it to a relevant topic. Below, a few notes to describe this process in detail.
The first collaborative innovation activities on OSIP were idea campaigns that focused on remote sensing of plastic marine litter and on enabling harbor-to-harbor autonomous shipping. The campaign themes gradually diversified to include lunar surface exploration, off-Earth manufacturing and construction, and even model-based system engineering and new usage of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components for space missions. As with any campaign, these activities searched for solutions to specific questions and had a set time frame.
The team used channels to house open calls for ideas that focused on more general topics. ESA created one of its first OSIP channels for co-funded research activities. It proved immensely popular, but feedback from OSIP users revealed that other project types could also benefit from having such an outlet.
“We received the feedback that having a channel for people to submit ideas for any of our Discovery idea development pathways would make it easier to work with ESA," Fontaine said. "So, we launched a new Channel called the ‘Open Discovery Ideas Channel’ where we sought ideas for co-sponsorship projects, early technology development projects, and system studies.”
The response to this open channel has been very encouraging and provides a new and interactive way to start innovating with ESA, a first for the agency. The biggest paradigm change really is the unique possibility to exchange with idea authors after they submit their ideas, and before ideas are evaluated. ESA experts can discuss and support the idea maturation interactively and informally, which helps both ESA and the idea authors generate relevant and highly innovative ideas.
The response to this open channel has been very encouraging and provides a new and interactive way to start innovating with ESA, a ‘first’ for the agency.
In terms of process, rigorous evaluation always follows the idea gathering. Next, the innovation team invites the authors of the most promising ideas to mature their thinking into full proposals. The latter is done with the help of an OSIP Channel targeted towards the specific implementation scheme.
The small and agile OSIP team manages the platform from a technical, content, and communication perspective. “The workload – which includes managing ideas, meeting with evaluators and campaign managers, and preparing follow-up activities – is immense, but the positive response from industry and academy and the exciting activities that have already kicked-off makes it very rewarding work,” Fontaine said.
The cornerstone of a vibrant, well-functioning open innovation platform is clarity.Image from the Lunar Caves campaign (credit: ESA)
Further reading: You can find regular updates on ideas sourced via OSIP here.
Looking back, OSIP is already clearly a worthwhile endeavor. When asked about the top three lessons learned, Fontaine and his team suggested the following:
OSIP successfully lowered the entrance barrier to ESA’s innovation pipeline – an impressive achievement given the complexity of this type of work. Today, OSIP allows ideas from diverse sources to be visualized in a simple, efficient, and transparent manner and for various stakeholders to network in new and unexpected ways. As user feedback has shown, the system and process can be continuously improved, and this task is highly effective if done collaboratively.
With this new vehicle in hand, ESA is prepared to boldly go where few space agencies have gone before: a voyage into deep (open innovation) space.
Learn more about HYPE's Open Innovation Solution here.