E109 | How To Use Open Innovation In The Corporate World with Jonty Slater

What would you do if you’ve sold your company for enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life - sail the Caribbean? Or start over. 

Today’s guest, Jonty Slater, Manager Director at Blue Globe Innovation is in the latter camp. Jonty decided to create a business and to give back at the same time. Blue Globe Innovation is like no other company, it’s an organisation that solves amazingly complex technical challenges for companies, governments and NGOs. 

Blue Globe Innovation runs open innovation challenges around the world and in this incredibly insightful episode, Jonty shares with listeners a few of the challenges he’s recently been involved in, including the UK government's ventilator challenge and the Rwanda Lake Kivu challenge. 

While these challenges are exciting, you might be wondering how they’re applicable to your organisation. Well, here’s the thing - CEOs are often great at linear innovation, really good at running business as usual. But a lot of the time they’re struggling to have incremental innovation. And that’s precisely where Jonty’s team can help. 

Open innovation isn’t just for finding solutions to big pandemic problems, like COVID. It’s a process that can be applied to solve your current business problem. 

This is a fantastic conversation and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. 

On today’s podcast:

• What is Blue Globe Innovation
• Open innovation and the innovation funnel
• Using the crowd to solve your corporate problem
• Africa Drone Forum
• How to reward staff for innovation
• Innovation databases
• Using innovation challenges as a CSR

Links:

• Innocentive
• Africa Drone Forum