Innovating differently: why companies must embrace collaboration

The 15th edition of the Open Innovation Challenge (1) came to a close in Lille, in northern France, on Wednesday 11 March 2026. 600 first-year Master’s students in EDHEC’s Business Management programme worked on real world problems submitted by 20 partner companies. Pierre-Jean Barlatier, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at EDHEC, coordinated the challenge as he does every year to teach students the new rules of innovation.

“Companies use open innovation when they stops assuming that innovation has to be in house and starts collaborating with external stakeholders from startups to universities, suppliers and customers,” explains the professor. This approach calls for a profound change in how future managers are trained. In Pierre-Jean Barlatier’s words, they need to become “architects of relationships rather than managers of resources” and be able to govern uncertainty, negotiate complex partnerships, understand ecosystems, and arbitrate between value creation and value sharing.

In 2003, Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough formalised the theoretical framework for open innovation. He believed that the rules of the game were changing in a world where knowledge is widely distributed and company performance depends on the ability to position yourself within innovation ecosystems.

Some companies, however, did not wait for the theory. In 2001 Procter & Gamble launched its Connect & Develop platform to open up its R&D processes to external contributors. The company used this model to develop the Oral-B Spinbrush toothbrush with external engineers, and later printed Pringles with the help of an Italian engineer specialising in bakery products.

No Company Can Innovate Alone

Open innovation is not a passing trend, Pierre-Jean Barlatier says. It has become a necessity amid the geopolitical, climate and health upheavals of the 21st century. “Today’s innovations draw on a combination of heterogeneous and complementary knowledge,” the professor says. An electric vehicle manufacturer, for example, needs to work with battery makers, software companies, energy providers, technology startups and even public authorities. No company can any longer claim to master the entire chain on its own.

Artificial intelligence has only intensified this need for collaboration. It requires “highly specialised skills that a single company might struggle to master alone: data collection, model training, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and more”. It also accelerates the cyclical pace of innovation, which can put large organisations, which may be less agile, under pressure. EDHEC’s Management in Innovative Health Chair observes this directly in the field by studying of how hospitals are already collaborating with AI-specialist startups to improve diagnostics.

Walking the Line Between Collaboration and Competition

And yet many companies remain reluctant. This is the Not Invented Here, or NIH, syndrome, says Pierre-Jean Barlatier: the belief,that if an innovation does not come entirely from within the company itself, it has no value and cannot generate a competitive advantage. But “coopetition” has proved its worth in pharmaceutical companies that collaborate on fundamental research platforms while remaining competitors on final products, for example.

The challenge is to be smart in how you balance the tension between collaboration and competition. Technological partnerships, developing incubators or accelerators with universities, crowdsourcing, using of social media (2), and venture clienting (where a large company becomes a startup’s first customer rather than simply an investor) are all proven techniques. The company gets fast access to new skills and reduced risk, since it can test the technology through a partnership. The opportunity lies in “turning to its advantage something it does not own”. The startup, in turn, can test its technology with a first customer and scale it up.

Managerial Dilemmas and Corporate Culture

These new forms of collaborative innovation require alignment between radically different corporate cultures. On one side are the large organisations which can be procedural and obsessed with controlled risk. On the other side are startups, which move fast, test and pivot. Companies need to know when to walk away from a project with strong potential value if it isn’t compatible with the group’s business model, and also remaining open to future opportunities, Pierre-Jean Barlatier says. A company might invite its partner to develop the solution independently while making a moderate investment and revisit the issue a few years later.

What if the project is no longer aligned with the company’s strategic direction by then? The innovation does not disappear. The company can partner with another player, enter other markets and receive royalties. “Maximising the value created by innovation beyond one’s own marketis one of the essential principles of open innovation.”

Managing these partnerships requires “very refined managerial skills” and, beyond that, an overarching strategy. “You cannot simply rename former innovation managers as open innovation managers,” Pierre-Jean Barlatier says with a smile. “You have to rethink the corporate culture and provide clear leadership from top management and more knowledge transfer from one business unit to another.”

References

(1) EDHEC celebrates 15 years of pedagogical challenges, April 2026 - https://www.edhec.edu/en/news/edhec-celebrates-15-years-pedagogical-challenges

(2) Open innovation and social networks: potential yet to be tapped, EDHEC Vox / The Conversation, Feb. 2025 - https://www.edhec.edu/en/research-and-faculty/edhec-vox/open-innovation-and-social-networks-potential-yet-to-be-tapped

Photo by ilgmyzin via Unsplash