Open Innovation: key trends across Europe

by Tom Staley - Technology Advisory and Innovation Lead, Sopra Steria Next UK
| minute read

Open Innovation, where corporates collaborate with dynamic startups to seek out new solutions to their business challenges, has gone mainstream. It’s already reshaping the products, services and business practices of some of the world’s largest conglomerates.

To get an insight into the open innovation phenomenon, we surveyed over 1,600 startups and organisations from the public and private sector across 10 European countries.

Let’s take a look at what we discovered from the survey. 

The survey was developed in partnership with Ipsos and INSEAD.

Infographic with the title open innovation, how the corporate start-up collaboration phenomenon across Europe is evolving.

First section titles collaboration is mainstream. It shows a map of Europe with 72% over the top and text saying almost 3 in 4 or 72% of European corporates are now running collaboration projects with startups. With the UK just below the average at 61%.

The next section is titled the priority level. Two-thirds or 67% of corporates rate collaboration as important or mission critical for their organisation's strategy. Corporates in the UK go further, with 81% rating collaboration as important or mission critical. Pie graph show cases 67% say important or mission critical, 32% say unimportant or slighly important and 1% don't know.

The next section is titled the importance of 3rd party intermediaries. More than two-thirds (67%) of corporates who hired an external party achieved their objectives all or most of the time, compared with 51% of corporates who did not use such external support.

The next section is titled the main rivers for collaboration. The left side bar graph shows what's in it for the organisations? 46% said new solutions, 45% said improved practices and 38% said unknown opportunities. The right side bar graph shows what's in it for startups? 50% said access to market, 44% said financial capital and 33% said access to people.

The next section is titled the biggest barriers. Pie chart showing what are the biggest collaboration blockers? 14% said legal and regulatory constrains, 14% said low risk tolerance, 12% said a lack of strategic focus from top management, 12% said cultural differences, 11% said misaligned business models, 11% said an inability to integrate the startup solution, 9% said a lack of structure and/ or processes, 8% said intellectual property concerns and 6% said misaligned collaboration objectives.

The next section is titled top collaboration topics. 36% said sustainability, 30% said cybersecurity and 28% said artificial intelligence.



Find out more in our Open Innovation Report 2023

Download the report here

Read more about the power of Open Innovation
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