Open innovation, the challenge of competence centers and SMEs

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The concept of open innovation has relatively “distant” origins, it takes us back to 2003 and was theorized by Professor Henry Chesbrough, holder of a chair at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”. This essay stated an assumption that was immediately accepted by multinational giants such as Procter & Gamble and IBM and by stars of the BigTech firmament such as Google and which later proved to be fundamental in promoting the transformation process of many large companies on a global scale.

The idea that no organization can have the brightest minds solely within itself and must also look for them outside its borders has also arrived from this side of the ocean and has slowly established itself as a new paradigm of distributed innovation management , capable of adapting (at different levels and at different speeds) to the business model of each company. A collaborative approach in the creation of value and a significant impact on the acceleration of the development of new technologies: this, in a nutshell, is the concrete translation of the concept developed by Chesbrough, which has now entered the list of priorities of many Italian companies, with Enel to pioneer a movement that involves both the private sector (start-ups obviously included) and the public sector.

A value of almost 700 million

A real ecosystem, in short, which has created a demand for services aimed at supporting the realization of these projects (in the field of AI, blockchain and Big Data) and which the newly created “Italian Open Innovation Lookout” Observatory promoted by School of Management of the Polytechnic of Milan began to map, evaluating the characteristics of the actors involved and the economic values ​​of these services. The starting point is known: 696 million euros, this is the turnover generated (85%) by five types of service providers (over 900 operators investigated), i.e. corporate innovation hubs, consultancies, technology transfer offices, competence centers and professional intellectual property firms, behind which players such as venture builders and start-up studios are rapidly growing. A conservative estimate, we read in the research, as it only quantifies the activity of the 15 provider categories for which data is available (compared to the 25 overall), but which – as one of the Observatory’s managers, Josip, explained to Il Sole 24ore Kotlar – «still offers many indicative signals of a dynamic ecosystem». As also indicated by a study by Sopra Steria which shows that Italian companies are particularly inclined to collaborate with open innovation ecosystems, revealing a propensity of 80%, compared to 57% in Germany, 61% in the United Kingdom, 70% of businesses in France.

Competence centers with Pnrr resources are involved

Then there is a further parameter which, according to Kotlar, should be read in a positive way, and that is the value of venture capital investments in Italy, calculated in the order of one billion euros according to the latest EY VC Barometer. A figure significantly lower than that exhibited by other European countries and which tells us how Italian companies strongly favor an approach to innovation based on collaboration with ecosystem players, rather than on equity investments to enter the shareholding structure of start-ups .

An important contribution, as observed by Federico Frattini, the other scientific director of the Observatory, can instead be made by the Pnrr funds, «because they have a strong hold on the ability of companies to face the digital transition and seize the opportunities for change. It is no coincidence that the research highlights the eight competence centers financed by the recovery and resilience plan to carry out orientation activities on Industry 4.0 issues among the key players in the Italian open innovation ecosystem”.