What is Open Innovation? It can be answered many ways, but there’s no right answer: They’re all correct. However, dependent on your goals, some approaches may be better than others. John Stewart recently gave a great overview of Open Innovation at Tate & Lyle. Stewart is director of Open Innovation at this leading global supplier of speciality food and ingredients. Open Innovation involves seeking out innovations from the outside world. However, the approach you take is driven by the goals of your Open Innovation program. The approach of employing crowd sourcing, for example, is appropriate if you goal is to find discrete solutions to technical problems, or to address a “holy grail” challenge. It’s not appropriate for finding market-ready products. Stewart breaks down appropriate approaches, based on the goals of your Open Innovation program At Tate & Lyle the goal of open innovation is to provide faster growth. Given this goal, Tate & Lyle focuses its open innovation efforts on the following activities:

• Cultivating partnerships with companies all across the board (large and small) to find new products and technologies
• Growing the innovation pipeline with those new products and technologies
• Acknowledging limits within the company and finding other companies to fill the gaps
• Cutting development time potentially by years

Consequently, Tate & Lyle focuses on these methods as part of its Open Innovation efforts:

• Contract research
• Basic research through academic collaborations
• Joint ventures
• Technology or company spin-offs

Tate & Lyle dedicates a small and focused part of its staff solely to Open Innovation. In line with it’s goal to drive growth, this staff focuses on methods like technology scouting, crowd sourcing and research consortia to achieve a perfect equilibrium in open innovation. But one of the most important parts of the entire process is credibility. “Open innovation is about finding the right partners,” Stewart says in his presentation. “One of the ultimate goals is to be recognized as the partner of choice in your sector.” Stay focused on the partnerships you build, and as Tate & Lyle suggests, treat your partners like customers. What do you think about open innovation? Could companies survive solely on internal development, or is it necessary to seek external partnerships? How does your company incorporate Tate & Lyle’s open innovation techniques?