An Innovator’s Midsummer DREAM COME TRUE

Organisations are eagerly looking for new ways to boost their innovation capabilities and open innovation is a widely accepted paradigm to achieve this goal. The Merck Innovation Cup is a new open innovation concept that brings together bright young talent and experienced retirees in a meeting of the generations to create breakthrough innovation. The concept which has already created considerable value for Merck can be broadly applied for global benefit. How to do it is described here based on experience gained over seven Innovation Cups in seven years.

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”
William Shakespeare, A midsummer night’s dream, Act 4, Scene 1

The evolution of an idea

Already long before Henry Chesbrough had coined the Open Innovation paradigm, the influx of new ideas and technologies into an organisation from outside the company boundaries had been an integral part of the strategy of pharmaceutical corporations. Working with established academic researchers in the frame of strategic partnerships is an established partnering approach, although competition for the best academic researchers has intensified over the years. In parallel, the war for talent has become more intense and there is an increased competition for the brightest minds to work for a given corporation after having finished their education. There are two kinds of undervalued strategic resources available that can be approached and combined in a synergistic manner to generate new innovative concepts: young talented students who have not yet entered the labour market for regular employment and retirees who left the company long ago. In this paper,