Why do some innovation partnerships succeed while others fail? The reasons are as varied as the motivations for partnering in the first place: market timing, capital intensity, geopolitics, and more. Yet certain patterns hold innovation back even in well-defined collaborations.
So what should you weigh when evaluating and developing your innovation portfolio?
Every industrial leader is under pressure to innovate faster, and the reflex is to reach for partners. Customers as co-developers, technology vendors as accelerators and start-ups for new capabilities. Joint ventures and spinouts to take bets that would never clear an internal investment committee. The assumption is usually that more collaboration means more speed.
Most leadership teams are still framing the issue incorrectly. The real focus should be on how to partner, not whether to. The better starting point is to look at which partnerships in the current portfolio are quietly slowing things down, and which ambitious bets are simply too complex to attempt alone.
When scaling helps, and when it becomes a drag
Large-ecosystem collaboration works well when the problem is too broad or complex for any single organisation to solve alone, and when pooling diverse expertise, resources, and reach genuinely accelerates progress. Often, though, momentum is lost because the number of participants grows faster than the ability to coordinate them. Roles overlap, ownership blurs, and decision-making slows.
Others succeed despite similar complexity because the collaboration model is tightly managed from the start:
- A leading organisation owns the roadmap.
- Partner roles are explicit.
- Decision rights are clear.
- Customer pilots are built into the process.
In short, scale can accelerate innovation, but only when someone is deliberately running the system rather than just assembling participants around it.
What the research says
Research on open innovation has made this point for years. The relationship between openness and innovation is not linear. The classic finding is an inverted U: more external partners help up to a point, after which the coordination cost of each additional partner erodes the very speed it was meant to create. And when the outcome measured is specifically innovation speed, broadening the collaboration tends, counterintuitively, to slow things down.
This matches what many R&D leaders quietly observe in their own portfolios. The project with three external partners that was supposed to be finished is still running, and nobody can quite point to which partnership caused the delay.
There is an important exception. For highly complex innovations, those involving multiple novel technologies, deep systems integration, or real uncertainty about whether the technology will work at all, broader collaboration earns its keep. It helps to offset the delays that complexity would otherwise impose, so that going wide actually reduces the drag rather than adding to it.
For ambitious bets, going wide and deep is the right move. For incremental work, the wide-and-deep approach mostly produces noise.
What this means for your innovation portfolio
For a typical equipment manufacturer, the implication is awkward but useful. Most companies run a mixed innovation portfolio in any given year: a dozen incremental product updates, a handful of meaningful platform extensions, and one or two genuinely ambitious bets such as a new propulsion architecture, an autonomy stack, or a redesigned service business built on digital twins. The collaboration logic for these three categories ought to differ. In practice, most companies apply roughly the same partner-management posture across all of them, often without realising it.
The lesson here is selectivity. Companies that announce they are “opening up” innovation tend to apply that posture uniformly. The evidence points the other way: concentrate openness where complexity is genuinely high. For the rest of the portfolio, a leaner partner structure, sometimes a single trusted partner, will simply move faster.
In our work with industrial customers, we see senior engineering and management attention as the real bottleneck, and most organisations spread it far too thin. A firm running fifteen active co-development relationships is almost certainly under-investing in the two or three that would benefit most. And when a large ecosystem is the right answer, it needs an architecture; without a backbone, it will drift.
Scaling innovation through partners is, ultimately, a choice about where to spend the organisation’s most constrained resource: its senior technical and commercial leadership’s attention.
Partnering for speed is not a numbers game
The leaders who consistently get speed out of partnerships are not the ones with the most partners or the most open posture. They are the ones who are clearest about which of their innovation bets genuinely need external knowledge to move faster and disciplined enough to keep the rest simple.
Partnering for speed is not a numbers game. It is an architecture problem.
If you are reshaping your innovation portfolio and want to discuss how to apply this thinking in your own organisation, we are happy to help.
Sources
- Laursen, K. & Salter, A. (2006). Open for Innovation: The Role of Openness in Explaining Innovation Performance Among U.K. Manufacturing Firms. Strategic Management Journal, 27(2), 131–150.
- van der Have, R. P. (2020). Seeking Speed: Managing the Search for Knowledge to Innovate Faster. Doctoral dissertation, Aalto University (Aalto University publication series Doctoral Dissertations 195/2020).
