Ten years reaching out from universities to make connections across business, policy and research have led me to think new forms of collaboration for innovation are needed and that corporate venturing is key to this picture. The sweet spot to be achieved is through communication that brings different forms of expertise together in fresh understandings of shared purposes and pathways, and the long view of the corporate sector is vital in this.
Across the board I repeatedly hear voiced the problem of “getting beyond silos” of thinking and approach, whether across corporate and SME cultures of operation, different policy contexts, or disciplines and methods within the research community.
I see two central questions in this scenario:
• Is progress being made quickly enough?
• Are sector silos – business, policy and research – a major problem?
I sense many involved with innovation would answer no to the first question. My experience suggests yes to the second question and that this is an area worth major focus to significantly speed up progress.
It suggests that while working on breaking down silos within the sectors of business, policy and research, we simultaneously need to focus more on breaking down the silos across them which are barriers to effective collaboration.
In relation to innovation, such collaboration is about bringing the best and most imaginative capacities to the table to create new products and services as well as new ways of doing things.
While policy often defines needs and priorities as well as frameworks, research can address those critically and creatively as well as thinking outside the box and generating new trajectories. Business is the investment and can-do, market and customer-oriented part of the equation. There is a mixed economy in funding, with public, research and private sources all part of the picture.
Generally, the focus is on specific innovations or innovation areas, and there has been growing intensification and success in links across business, policy imperatives and research along these lines. This is powerful as far as it goes but are there deeper possibilities for collaboration if more focus is given to breaking down the silos dividing business, policy and research?
This would entail more open engagement around cultures of innovation, and recognition that each of the sectors has particular skillsets, knowledge bases and resources that contribute to that. Discoveries would include matched and mutually reinforcing competences and orientations currently buried beneath assumptions by one sector of difference, clashing languages, and previously unknown factors in respect of the others.
For example, one aspect of the university research environment that I frequently have to point out in business and policy settings is its long-standing stability which gives it solid scope for future-visioning that is also well informed by the past. But recently I have begun to think a lot about how much mutual strength could be built by collaborations with corporate venturing which has its own specific approaches to the long view.
What I envision here is new potential for the university and corporate sectors to enter further into the knowledge-based and expertise-driven worlds of each other, to extend their understanding of each other’s strengths and cultures of innovation, to produce more complex and sustainable collaborative frameworks.
The role of strategy and risk-taking comes into this picture too. Universities in recent years have become increasingly aware of the importance of strategic imperatives as they operate in competitive settings where distinguishing themselves and what they offer is both challenging and essential. Universities have also begun to engage more with questions of risk as part of these processes. Corporate venturing has a strategic approach, and the management of risk is at its core, so this is rich mutual territory.
Fresh experienced eyes from corporate venturing on what universities are and the diversity of their human and knowledge-focused capital could not only benefit universities substantially but could also offer unexpected and fruitful inputs to the perspectives of corporate venturing itself. The focus of universities on new knowledge, its communication and application, is a strength on their side. And to flip the coin, universities can benefit from understanding better the contrasting knowledge-base of corporate venturing.
The current strategic challenge within universities is also significantly about inter-disciplinarity and the need to break down more effectively the silos dividing areas of knowledge or disciplines to address the grand challenges of our times, from ageing to security to environmental sustainability. Research funding is strongly focused on this and on the need to develop problem-solving approaches to make research more effective outside the academy.
The can-do stance of corporate venturing could both offer the university sector a keen pragmatic and applied eye to how different forms of disciplinary knowledge might need to be associated in new ways, as well as contribute to how that might be done. At the same time corporate venturers would be exposed to rich veins of knowledge within universities of which they may currently have little awareness.
Universities in this context are the main repositories of comprehensive spectrums of knowledge from all areas of the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. This range of intellectual and applied resources sets them apart as a unique site of potential for complex innovation. Their large size as institutions matches up well to corporate scale, suggesting a useful fit for corporate venturing in exploring and making the most of this complexity.
Building an even more cohesive and dynamic innovation culture is in part about creating a more integrated knowledge economy where there are new forms of open interrogative collaboration benefiting all sectors – business, policy and research – and where these sectors will learn from one another.