Open innovation can stimulate a virtuous cycle of collaboration across the education ecosystem.
In a sector as interconnected as education, the most powerful educational solutions emerge when diverse stakeholders — educators, technologists, policymakers, funders, and learners — combine their expertise and resources toward shared goals. This is especially true in an environment of accelerating technological change and funding uncertainty; collaborative approaches allow organizations to pool limited resources for greater impact.
Yet impactful partnerships do not just happen; they require intentional effort and support to create and sustain. Open innovation mechanisms — such as prize competitions, accelerators, or hackathons — can be a tool to create partnerships across three interconnected levels of the education innovation ecosystem: between solvers working toward shared goals, between organizations and thought leaders providing support to solvers and solutions, and between likeminded funders collaborating on joint initiatives. Partnership and open innovation are mutually reinforcing strategies to drive educational innovation.
This month, the Luminary Labs team will be at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego with the Walton Family Foundation and Siegel Family Endowment. In a session on open innovation partnerships, we’ll explore these three levels of partnership through the lens of the Learning Landscapes Challenge, and offer attendees an opportunity to workshop their own partnership ideas with each other. Ahead of the Summit, we’re exploring how open innovation can drive transformational change in education.
Partnerships between solvers help strengthen and advance solutions
Solving thorny and multifaceted problems often requires understanding why solutions don’t yet exist — and then assembling a broad coalition with different types of expertise, methodologies, and solver groups to help close the gap. By elevating an important problem and inviting a broad range of potential solvers to put forward solutions, open innovation can encourage new partnerships between otherwise disconnected organizations.
While many initiatives expect or hope that individual solvers or grantees will find the right partnerships on their own, meaningful collaboration is much more likely when it’s part of an innovation program’s design. Open innovation can provide a structure to not just ask for partnership between solvers, but to facilitate it. While many open innovation programs are competitions, they can also be designed to incentivize collaboration as well.
Multiphase competitions or challenges allow flexibility to build in phases for intentional partnership development. For instance, in the Learning Landscapes Challenge, we knew that a focus on earlier-stage innovations in the nascent field of multidimensional infrastructure meant that many teams with promising ideas would not have all of the partnerships required for success secured at the beginning of the challenge. Instead of requiring solvers to come in with established partners, Phase 1 was designed to cast a wide net and award 40 teams with an initial prize. The Phase 1 awards served as a signal to the market and potential partners that these were compelling and innovative ideas. And since the prizes were not restrictive like some types of grant funding, Phase 1 winners were free to pursue any partnerships that could advance their solutions.
To create additional opportunities for connection, a partnership platform on the challenge website highlighted solvers’ specific partnership needs, as well as the capabilities and offerings of interested external organizations.
Through the cultivation of meaningful shared experiences and interactions, open innovation challenges can create a strong sense of community within cohorts of solvers. In many cases, despite the fact that they are competing with one another, solvers are eager to share information and knowledge with each other. In some cases, we even see multiple solvers decide to formally partner on a single submission. Regardless of the form it takes, partnership and collaboration often help solvers augment their expertise and advance their solutions in ways that would not be possible if they were working on their own.
Ecosystem partnerships engage supporters to catalyze enduring impact
Successfully developing, launching, and scaling new solutions often requires support from a wider national or international ecosystem of organizations providing technical support, products, or services. In addition to prize funds, recognition, and publicity, open innovation challenges help link solver teams with these key nodes of support. The technical assistance and mentorship provided by these challenge champions is often seen as the most valuable benefit of participating. Open innovation challenges can activate this wider ecosystem through thoughtful outreach to potential solvers who can bring new ideas, judges who can evaluate submissions, and subject matter experts and mentors who can support solvers. This broad network delivers mutual benefit — solvers receive crucial support while champions gain exposure to new solutions, approaches, and organizations that enrich their own networks.
One key way that open innovation mechanisms can build this community is through tentpole moments that bring together solvers and challenge champions. Challenge launch announcements, accelerators, boot camps, hackathons, demo days, and other important milestones bring together the challenge community to showcase and support the work of the solvers, but also invest in the social infrastructure that will support partnership within and beyond the challenge.
The excitement and momentum of a challenge can stimulate the broader market and can drive interest in a newly defined or under invested in field. In the case of the Learning Landscapes Challenge, the framing of multidimensional learning infrastructure brings together a unique intersection of education, technology, design, urban planning, and workforce development stakeholders, and provides new framing and terminology to unify work that has been ongoing in different sectors. While the primary goal of the challenge is to identify and support groundbreaking innovations, the network and community of practice created will live on beyond the timebound challenge, yielding additional benefits and return on investment for years to come.
Funder partnerships advance a shared vision
When problems are particularly challenging to solve, funders need to be even more thoughtful about how to make their investments count. Partnerships between multiple funders can yield outsized benefits, particularly when complimented with open innovation approaches. While pooling resources can increase administrative and cost efficiency, the ability to tap into multiple networks and the increased excitement and authority stemming from the collaboration can be even more impactful. Partnership between funders can be catalytic in a way that is more than the sum of its parts.
This is not to say that funder partnerships are easy; there are higher transaction costs and additional complexities when organizations must align the strategies, approaches, and systems of multiple entities. However, the additional effort to find the intersection of organizational priorities can help identify new areas of opportunity that might not otherwise receive investment and attention. For instance, the Learning Landscapes Challenge was developed at the intersection of two funders’ priorities — multidimensional infrastructure and the future of learning. The challenge focus on connecting future-ready K-12 learning experiences is a sweet spot for innovation that is not only distinct, but also unlocking innovation that would not have happened if these two funders did not come together.
Typically, when funders collaborate to sponsor a specific grant program, they must first align on the full terms of the grant, the organizations they will support, the intended outcomes, reporting requirements, and budget details. Open innovation partnerships begin with a shared goal and joint commitment to find creative solutions — but can remain open to discovering new ideas and solvers to support. While funders will still have to make a variety of decisions — for example, success criteria, solver eligibility, and submission requirements — the process of co-designing an open innovation program is an integral part of the partnership development process.
Through an intentional and collaborative process, the Learning Landscapes Challenge has gone from over 270 submissions to five Phase 3 teams that have incredibly diverse approaches, yet all demonstrate innovative and compelling multidimensional infrastructure solutions that align with both funders’ strategic priorities.
Partnership is prerequisite to innovation
Meaningful partnership is key to innovation, and open innovation is a powerful tool for creating and strengthening partnerships. In our most recent State of Open Innovation survey of 100+ leading organizations, more than three-quarters (77%) of respondents said they collaborate with external organizations such as community groups or industry partners to design and administer open innovation programs to achieve their goals and remain competitive.
The education sector faces unique challenges — limited funding, complex contextual variables, and diverse stakeholder needs — and the shifting landscape only increases the relevance of strategic partnerships. By deliberately designing programs that recognize and leverage the competitive advantages of different partners, organizations can address challenges that would be insurmountable alone.
