Your Open Innovation Journey
Open Innovation Audit
Identify what your organization is truly ready for, and illuminate the right Open Innovation pathway from where you stand today.
Organizational Alignment
Orient your C-Suite, GMs and product owners to the same true North for maximum Open Innovation impact.
Engine Design and Initiation
We’ll spin up a repeatable process for your open innovation efforts, and get it started with your legal, business and technical leaders in place.
Our unique approach
Open innovation is a must-have element of any large organization’s growth portfolio — under conditions of great change, you need a consistent way to derive new value from outside the gilded cage of your own walls.
As powerful as it is, your brand locks you into a certain way of behaving and limits what you can do alone. You need innovation partners!
CAF guides you on a journey to identify the right sectors, themes and resources for your open innovation effort by aligning key internal stakeholders and determining the right engines for your particular organization. From initial assessment to partnership creation, we’re with you all the way.
Dr. Diana Joseph is CEO of CAF and lead author of the forthcoming book, Open Innovation Works. Dr. Felipe Negritto, Head of Research at CAF, is an expert in innovation absorption.
Key Benefits
Bring key players to the table to identify and solve your innovation challenges
We bring third-party curiosity, expertise and authority that brings the attention of your key stakeholders and shifts the conversation from the conceptual to the practical
Field-tested methods specific to corporate open innovation
Over CAF’s five years in operation, combined with our background in corporate open innovation, we’ve learned from field experience, and we can deliver that experience to your setting
Deeply customized approach
We help you zero in on the open innovation strategies and tactics best suited to your organization’s goals and culture
Case Study
What: A large manufacturing company engaged Diana to kick off an open innovation strategy planning session including between 10 leaders from 4 different innovation stakeholder groups.
Scope: This one-day workshop covered innovation strategy, scenario testing and accelerator design.
Goals: Move beyond the library research phase into active program development and testing.
Audience: Technical, Venture, Finance and Legal.
Results: Crisp vision, mission, strategy, startup selection criteria and metrics for a minimum viable accelerator concept.
What: Activate, a non-profit organization dedicated to the scaling up and impact of scientific research, hired CAF to improve and bring awareness to a new, simplified partnership method, the Simple Partnership Agreement (SiPA).
Scope: Dr. Diana Joseph designed an interview study, trained Activate staff, and led dozens of industry leader interviews to understand the specific processes that large organizations use to generate contracts with startups. Joseph and Activate strategic partnership specialist Nikhil Gargeya used these interview findings to update web and paper materials to increase adoption.
Goal: Help startups and corporates partner more effectively through a streamlined contract format.
Audience: Contract agreements are a major obstacle that stops meaningful partnerships from moving forward. While Activate is focused on the energy sector, we believe that any corporate engaging with startups can benefit from this streamlined approach. Startups can also lead the way by starting contract conversations with SiPA.
Results: Joseph and Gargeya’s article “Cracking the Contract Conundrum,” appears in the respected innovation industry publication InnoLead. It’s initial publication drove a huge increase in downloads of the SiPA documents. Learn more at activate.org.sipa.
What: The Alliance for SoCal Innovation, a leading ecosystem developer in Southern California, asked Diana to design and host a 50-person workshop for a broad range of stakeholders across the region and across industries.
Scope: Full day program for 50 stakeholders in the regional ecosystem
Goals:
- Convene SoCal’s regional leaders to align best practices, external messaging, and delivery of services and resources to harness the collective potential of the region’s innovative assets to make SoCal the next great innovation ecosystem.
- Unify, Connect and Engage the top leaders who represent the compelling innovation nodes that define the SoCal innovation network.
- Achieve a collective clarity of purpose, goals, and a coordinated strategy to tackle the shared challenges and opportunities across SoCal.
- Create and galvanize an ongoing innovation leadership group that can tackle current and future regional hurdles to innovation.
Audience: Approximately 50 innovation leaders from corporations, startups, municipalities, incubators, non-profits, investors and universities.
Results: Action plans and insights captured in a graphical insight deck. After this kickoff, working groups continued to meet and take action in the region based on the relationships and insights that emerged from the event.
What Participants Are Saying
Companies we have worked with
