This week we had very senior visitors from some of the largest companies in the world. They came to Cambridge for two days of pre-arranged 1-to-1 meetings with local companies with technologies in their key areas of interest, combined with a dinner with some of our Founder members and a large networking event around new ideas from some ideas coming out of our Universities.
Businesses like Procter & Gamble probably don't need to come to Cambridge to learn about the principles of Open Innovation, although it turned out they did know of the work going on here on the topic. P&G's success with the approach made the concept popular, and they mandate that 50% of R&D projects need to be carried out externally. Our visitor is just one of 30 scouts around the world constantly meeting with potential partners and signposting them to the right people in the business to assess their technology and scope a potential project.
Obviously nobody was talking in detail in the lunches and dinner breaks about the local companies and University units that they rated most highly. There is simply too much potential overlap between the innovations that a PepsiCo or a Procter & Gamble could exploit. But they were prepared to say how many "hits" they had got from their last visit - initial meetings that resulted in successful collaborations. They were clear that the process of pre-qualifying from among many potential leads locally generates many more hits than they get in equivalent partnering sessions elsewhere in the world - typically 3 or 4 in a two day period. For our Members who kindly sponsored the event, East of England International and Cambridge Science Park, those projects also represent a hit - new investment and new exports from this region.
At the dinner, we heard about Open Innovation from one of our Founder Members who had first come to Cambridge as a visitor on Cambridge Gateway. Philips Research have an active policy of inviting other companies to co-locate with them in Eindhoven - but still chose to locate a research unit here in Cambridge to participate.
Clearly the Corporate Gateway is helping Cambridge ideas to change the world - and I was personally very happy to find each of our guests so satisfied at the end of their visit.
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