Esther Gons has probably heard the word “collaboration” a thousand times in meeting rooms. And just as often, she has watched it play out differently in practice.
She is one of the clearest thinkers on open innovation I have spoken to in recent years. Not because she is an optimist, because she isn’t, really, but because she points to exactly where things go wrong. Our conversation for the Novum podcast brought up something I had been carrying around for a while.
What Open Innovation Promises
Open innovation is the idea that, as an organisation, you don’t have to develop all your knowledge in-house. You partner with startups, research institutions and other government bodies. You share your problems, and sometimes your solutions too.
At Novum, the innovation lab inside the SVB, that is everyday practice. We bring in expertise we don’t have ourselves, and we work with outside parties on questions that had stalled internally. Even so, I recognise exactly what Esther describes: the moments where collaboration runs aground on internal logic.
The Structure That Slows You Down
Government is not an ordinary organisation. It works within a legal framework that slows innovation down by design. It answers to ministries, to politics and to citizens. You can’t engineer your way around that. It is the context.
So open innovation in government always means juggling. You want speed, but the system demands care. You want to experiment, but failure lands differently than it does in a startup. You want to bring in outside knowledge, yet procurement rules decide how.
That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to be honest about what “open” really means in a government setting.
Absorptive Capacity
Esther said something that stuck with me. Open innovation usually fails not for a lack of ideas, but for a lack of absorptive capacity. The organisation can’t process the external input. Not because it doesn’t want to, but because the internal structures were never built for it.
I recognise that. Novum exists to build exactly that capacity. But the tension never goes away: how do you innovate in an environment designed for predictability?
In practice, that means starting small, showing what works, and scaling up only once you have. No grand programmes that get approved upstream and then die downstream. Small moves that build trust inside the organisation.
What It Asks of You
I don’t have a neat answer to how you do this well. What I do know is that open innovation only works if the organisation is willing to be uncomfortable for a while. That asks for leadership, not just an innovation department.
The conversations that pay off most are the ones where someone from outside names something that never gets said inside. It grates. And that is exactly the point.