State of Open Innovation 2023 report: Organizations use open innovation to address their most urgent and important goals

100+ leading organizations across 20+ industries offer fresh perspectives on designing programs, developing partnerships, and measuring outcomes. 

NEW YORK, Nov. 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The world has changed dramatically in the past five years, and in this new world, there's a growing awareness of open innovation and recognition of its potential to achieve an organization's most urgent and important goals. Today, Luminary Labs released the State of Open Innovation 2023, a follow-up to the company's landmark 2018 report. The new report, available online at luminary-labs.com, includes insights from open innovation leaders at more than 100 organizations — including AstraZeneca, Bayer, MIT Solve, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, Siegel Family Endowment, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the University of Chicago, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Open innovation comes of age
Five years ago, collaboration was "the new competitive edge." Now, across sectors, partnership is a prerequisite, and open innovation is essential to keeping pace in a rapidly changing world. Open innovation — a model or methodology that intentionally expands beyond internal resources, inviting external innovators and partners to help advance a goal or solve a problem — can include initiatives like prize competitions, accelerators, hackathons, crowdsourcing, open data/research, participatory design, and open partnership models such as consortia.

A number of survey respondents noted that open innovation is increasingly the norm, rather than a niche approach. Collaboration, transparency, and other hallmarks of open approaches are seen as necessities for organizations tackling increasingly complex problems. When asked how important open innovation is to their organization's mission and/or strategy on a scale of one (not meaningful) to five (core to our success), more than six in 10 respondents (61%) responded with four or five.

Many organizations that have mature open innovation competencies — with expert people, teams, and processes — are also organizations where open innovation is important to the mission and strategy. When asked to rank the current state of their organization's open innovation competency, one in five (19%) said their organizations have a mature competency, and only a few (4%) said they had a nascent or undeveloped competency; the remaining three-quarters (77%) of respondents gave their organizations a rating of 2-4 on a five-point scale, indicating developing competencies.

"Executives are showing more confidence in open innovation to achieve business goals," says Luminary Labs CEO Sara Holoubek. "This year the message is loud and clear: If you want to think big, you need to think open — forging novel partnerships, co-creating solutions, and even augmenting humans with AI — in pursuit of meaningful outcomes for humanity."

External partnerships are scaling open innovation's impact
Across every sector, leaders are using open innovation to engage other organizations and build relationships beyond their own teams. More than three-quarters (77%) of survey respondents collaborate with external organizations to design and administer open innovation programs. More than half (54%) of survey respondents have used open innovation to identify potential partners, investments, or acquisitions. Open innovation hinges on Joy's law, named for Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and is rooted in the idea that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." The evolution toward external partnership is helping organizations fully realize the promise of open innovation by embracing collaboration and mutual benefit.

There are still opportunities for open innovation to mature and advance
As with any new way of working, identifying talent and building internal capacity are critical. Leading practitioners also offered ideas for overcoming common barriers and further advancing open innovation through innovator-centered design, strategic storytelling, and the use of emerging AI tools.

The report includes a full summary of results from Luminary Labs' 2023 survey, which included three categories of questions: structure and approach; goals and outcomes; and activities, incentives, and investment. The survey was conducted by Luminary Labs from May 19 through July 6, 2023, and intentionally sought responses from a breadth of organizations and industries across government, academia, nonprofit, and private sectors. Luminary Labs invited the sponsors of different types of open innovation initiatives — including prize competitions, accelerators, hackathons, crowdsourcing, open data/research, participatory design, and open partnership models such as consortia — to participate in the survey. To gain deeper insights into survey results, Luminary Labs conducted in-depth interviews with selected respondents.

Learn how 100+ leading organizations are using open innovation to stay at the forefront. Read the executive summary and download the full report at https://www.luminary-labs.com/insight/state-of-open-innovation-2023/.

About Luminary Labs
Luminary Labs is a strategy and innovation consultancy established in 2009. Thorny problems are our strong suit: We are energized by complex, multistakeholder spaces where the solutions are not obvious and the potential for impact is high. Our work spans a broad cross section of topics across four focus areas: the future of work and education, the future of health, scientific discovery, and infrastructure.

Luminary Labs has been tasked with designing and producing open innovation programs on behalf of public, private, and nonprofit organizations, representing more than $250 million in potential cash incentives for accelerating effective, scalable solutions.

Learn more about Luminary Labs: luminary-labs.com.

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SOURCE Luminary Labs