Innovative partnerships
Announcing the launch of the InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion
Words: Tim Fishlock, Open Innovation Lead at the Royal Society of Chemistry
The term 'open innovation' describes the process of sourcing ideas, expertise and technologies from outside as well as inside an organisation, to accelerate innovation.By sharing risk and reward, open innovation addresses challenges that organisations face, by using external expertise to solve problems and drive development of new products and technologies.
During the last decade, open innovation has become a well-known concept adopted by companies across science, engineering and technology in particular. Although the shift from purely internal innovation to a more open structure has proved popular for industry leaders, it can be a risky process, fraught with challenges. That’s why we’re partnering with InnoCentive to help lower some of the barriers organisations may face when searching for external ideas and practising open innovation.
Open Innovation intermediaries
Intermediaries like InnoCentive facilitate open innovation by crowdsourcing solutions to business, scientific and technical problems or needs. In the instance of InnoCentive, they partner with their customers to refine, abstract and formulate these problems or needs as ‘Challenges’ utlizing InnoCentive’s Challenge-Driven Innovation methodology. These Challenges are then broadcast to InnoCentive’s large network of problem Solvers through their web site, InnoCentive.com. Promoting key innovation needs in this way can source solutions from beyond the boundaries of an organisation’s existing network.
The InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion
Our partnership with InnoCentive will enable commercial, government, and not-for-profit customers of InnoCentive, to highlight their Challenges on the new InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion.
The Pavilion is a dedicated area on InnoCentive.com featuring InnoCentive-customer Challenges of interest to our community. These Challenges are well-articulated descriptions of scientific and technical problems that require innovative solutions. The InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion will provide these InnoCentive customers with unprecedented access to our global community of problem solvers from across the chemical sciences.
As Open Innovation Lead at the Royal Society of Chemistry, I’m proud to see that we are at the forefront of bringing significant advances in the chemical sciences to the attention of the research community, catalysing collaboration and disseminating knowledge.
This partnership with InnoCentive is a key component of our new open innovation programme. By launching the InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion we are providing our community with an opportunity to apply their practical knowledge to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems. It’s not however just large organisations that can benefit from working with open innovation intermediaries. The process provides an opportunity for the successful solver to establish new collaborations and routes for their technologies.
Anyone with ideas can suggest solutions to the Challenges posted on our open innovation pavilion. That includes researchers, students and practising chemists working in academia or industry, members with years of specialist chemistry knowledge, entrepreneurs or simply those looking to give back to the community.
Craig Jones, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at InnoCentive, says: "We’re delighted to be partnering with an organization that has the prestige and rich history of the Royal Society of Chemistry, extending our problem-solving network to bright new minds and helping further our mission of pluralizing innovation.
"Chemistry-related Challenges have been a core part of InnoCentive’s heritage and success since spinning off from Eli Lilly and this partnership strengthens our connection with great chemists around the world".
Challenges on the InnoCentive–Royal Society of Chemistry Open Innovation Pavilion will be promoted across our websites. We hope this exciting new partnership will provide our community with tangible opportunities to unlock new routes to collaboration and become involved in addressing some of the greatest challenges facing our world today.
AstraZeneca and InnoCentive - a case study
As a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines, AstraZeneca understands that the healthcare environment is changing rapidly. To overcome the ever-increasing cost of Research & Development (R&D) and the need to get novel medicines to patients faster, AstraZeneca is embracing open collaboration.
One of the key ways in which they engage and collaborate with external scientists is via the AstraZeneca Open Innovation website. The platform facilitates partnerships across the entire spectrum of drug discovery and development and has five main components:
- clinical compound bank
- pharmacology toolbox
- target innovation
- new molecule profiling
- R&D challenges.
AstraZeneca has partnered with InnoCentive to crowdsource solutions for these R&D Challenges, utilizing InnoCentive’s Challenge-Driven Innovation methodology and platform, to put them out to InnoCentive’s network of over 375,000 diverse and creative problem solvers
Since 2014, there have been 14 Challenges posted. From the 10 Challenges that have been completed, 14 winners were awarded a total of $175,000. Two particularly notable results occurred in the Development of Targeted Oligonucleotide Delivery and Retrievable Device for Islet Transplantation Challenges, from which Solvers were invited to execute their winning submissions in subsequent Reduction-to-Practice Challenges.
While the content of these submissions is confidential, the hope is that these technologies will play a significant role in advancing the development of new medicines.