This year I attended Innov8rs Amsterdam conference on the topic of open innovation. For years this has been one of the most promising approaches to change how companies innovate, but somehow, it has been failing to deliver.

As Ana Vazquez Romero from The Next Web, pointed startup scouting and qualification is a lagging capability appearing missing in corporate centers of innovation. It links back to an opportunity I worked before related with positive impact finance that was bridging trough an investment vehicle reducing social and financial inequality while supporting the growth of the local economy, combining connectivity, clean energy, inclusive finance, agro-tech, healthcare, and education, creating smart communities, tackling UN’s SDGs rests on closing a yearly US$2.6 trillion investment gap.

Platform business models were expecting to enable such propagation, connecting corporations with startups and accelerating innovation waves. Frank Mattes, from Lean Scaleup, shared that despite the promise of building systems that scale innovation outcomes by orders of magnitude with “0 increase in headcount” is still a journey to be completed, scaling-up external startups not embedded in the greater scheme of things.

The most successful platform models are founder-led, when one organization needs full control to converge at maximum the monetization potential, dampening at minimum the power coming from external patties. Successful cooperative-led ecosystem types – those that supports cross-company integration or defined value exchanges and are platforms that might unite multiple industry around a common set of capabilities – are still facing hard to scale, but that might be about to change. It reminds me of the promise of telecoms becoming technology companies that is still a hurdle to overcome. The only question is when will it happen? On this industry, the looming of programable 5G networks which 3rd party solution development will allow easily add or remove components for customization and adaptability.

Banks to the lead on pursuing open innovation, the spark of the fintech threat ignited the change, digital banks are curating third-party products via an online marketplace, avoiding the overhead of building, supporting, and scaling their own products while quickly assembling an extensive service for both personal and corporate segments. Another bright example is GitHub, which changed positively open-source software development.

Julia van Boven, from Impact Nation at ABN AMRO Bank, shared how cross sector between investment banking and cross-sector partnerships is increasingly being defined shifting from just proving financial resources to adding core competencies to change business models and underlying operations to become more sustainable.

I also realize working with a leading petrochemical company that implements a cradle-to-cradle approach on continuously intensifying the ability to restore, retain and redistribute materials, components and products back into the system optimally, including, new molecular engineering, exploring the limits of resource optimization cannot be implemented by creating, possessing and keeping close to chest intellectual property, as out of corporate boundaries better approaches already exist.

Open and collective innovation is key to build resilience and keep competing in new ways, those who integrate the ability to cooperate with external entities, irrespective if they are activists, micro-enterprises, or same size companies, co-developed outside of the organization.