A Arenas-Calderón1, FF Garcés-Obando1, D Valderrama1 and E Arboleda2
1CENICAÑA, Cali, Colombia
2Estratek, Medellín, Colombia; eliana.arboleda@estratek.com.co
With the premise that not all smart people work for your company, the Colombian Sugarcane Research Center-CENICAÑA began searching for partners to establish collaborative pilots for startups that had advanced solutions for some challenges requiring accelerated technological development processes. With the guidance of a group of corporate venturers and a network of entrepreneurs, CENICAÑA launched a call to the entrepreneurial ecosystem for open innovation. This approach was used to learn about initiatives and possible partners for subsequent collaborations. The successes, the lessons learned, and the experience acquired are addressed. During scouting, two startups were found with solutions aligned to the challenges identified by CENICAÑA. For some of the challenges identified, projects were found but in a technological maturity lower than TRL (Technology Readiness Level ) of 4-5. The solutions found allowed us to approach the end client as part of the testing team with greater confidence and understanding of the problems. Regarding the lessons learned, it is very important to develop an intellectual property agreement and define the scope of a possible growth of the proposed solution. In conclusion, the open innovation process was found to integrate knowledge among CENICAÑA, mills, and external companies’ experts in topics that are not part of the institutional core, finding more dynamic, agile, and profitable solutions to solve problems that in the short term will benefit the sugar sector by making it more productive and efficient.