Keywords: networking

The Open Innovation Lab is an open innovation program that brings large corporation´s challenges to the awareness of local entrepreneurs and academia, enabling connections that become new products. It makes use of a proven methodology and offers support during each cycle of innovation.

With the increasing complexity of technology and business, the development of innovative and competitive business solutions fall beyond the capabilities of a single company. An open innovation approach, drawing on a broader and external network of knowledge and technology, enables a faster and more fruitful process of generating solutions for mission-critical business challenges and for developing new innovative products for incumbent companies. An essential feature of this approach is to combine the resources of larger companies and the knowledge, flexibility and creativity of a diverse cohort of small innovative startups. It works as follows: First, Brazilian companies interested in participating in the programme will pose business challenges. These challenges will be presented to Brazilian and UK startups, curated from Porto Digital. After that, there is an co-ideation process where all parties will discuss these challenges and come up with possible solutions. If both parties agree on proceeding to developing a prototype, they should work together to complete that prototype within 15 days. If the prototype shows potential for development, they might pursue a Minimum Viable Product within the next three months. If the product is understood to be viable, they will proceed to commercially exploring the opportunity. Porto Digital supports all participants throughout the whole process, from articulating stakeholders to term sheet agreements and project sprints´ reviews.

Established in 2000, Porto Digital is a coordinated action between Market, Government and Academia that resulted in one of the main innovation environments in Brazil. However, it faces two complementary challenges: in one hand, you have an importante number of startups that, despite having great expertises and capabilities, in most cases than not build solutions for low priority or even non-existent problems, which leads ultimately to its discontinuation. And in another hand you have companies from around the world facing complex challenges to which solutions cannot be easily found in the market. To tackle this problem, Porto Digital has developed an open innovation programme (OIL) with a proven methodology and a dedicated team focused on bringing large corporation´s challenges to the awareness of local entrepreneurs and academia, enabling connections that become solutions and, eventually, products.

With 3 OIL programs concluded untill the moment with 3 different companies, the OIL Program has had 10 startups collaborating in the ideation fase, which led to 3 non-functional prototypes and 2 MVPs, further developed into 2 brand new products. The revenue for the new products is US$5.3M in 2017. The OIL program expects to generate new businesses of around US$30M+ in the next 5 years. The program has also brought large companies closer to the technology park ecosystem, increasing the understanding of how the various actors can create new opportunities in a collaborative way and minimize existing barriers by understanding the methodology and the terms of the collaboration, greatly contributing to the socio-economic development.

The main users are startups, established tech companies, academia, experts, innovators and research institutes in the ecosystem of Porto Digital, as well as large corporations owners of the challenges -, which response to developing innovative and competitive business solutions fall beyond its capabilities due to the increasing complexity of technology and business.

Porto Digital OIL Team is the main responsible for running the program, although it can partner with other STP and institutions to run binational or even multinational open innovation programs collaboratively. For the purpose of the OIL Program, Porto Digital has physical structures to carry out events and a dedicated team of innovation managers, legal and accounting body to support the participants during each cycle.