How Innovate UK’s collaboration programme is solving organisational challenges

One thing that is crucial to success in today’s world is collaboration. This has been the bane of existence for most organisations and has recently become a key area of focus for organisations with challenges in search of a way to reduce their waste footprint as well as contribute their quota to the SDGs. The question there to ask is, how do they form these partnerships and establish these connections?

You will agree with me when I say that a room full of industry leaders, solution providers and innovators is a key part of any connection to be formed for small or large organisations looking for a lasting solution to their challenges. This was nothing short of the experience at the just-concluded business mixer event organised by Innovate UK

One of the major highlights of the event was the availability of solution providers ready to take up new challenges and proffer solutions to existing challenges of companies present. This great initiative by Innovate UK through its project Global Alliance Africa not only addressed the concerns of large and small Organisations but created a springboard for new partnerships as well as connections to be formed and established between challenge holders and solution providers.

Aside from this, the event highlighted the success stories of Innovate UK in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa through their Open innovation challenge which is connecting companies with specific challenges to innovators who are already working on solutions. One of the many outstanding challenges held in Nigeria worthy of mention was the Hinckley Recycling Battery Innovation Challenge which was to identify solutions for second life Lithium Ion batteries and develop battery inventory systems. Other notable challenge holders worthy of mention are TGI, Animal care and Berger paints.

Berger Paints? What possible challenge can a paint company like Berger face? Well, I was as intrigued as every attendee when the Chief Operating Officer of Berger Paints, Mr Celestine Aruoture, spoke about their challenge with expired paints as they are in search of a solution that can make a valuable product out of expired paints for the ecosystem. You can’t begin to imagine the damage of expired paints to the ecosystem especially if not converted into something valuable that be reused. A billion-dollar solution is needed, right? There is also the Innovation Exchange challenge programme where they match real industry problems for large businesses with innovative companies or academic institutions that can provide market-ready solutions to those problems.

I for one was fascinated by how Babar Javed the Open Innovation Lead gave a simple but detailed explanation about the goal of the Open Innovation Exchange programme ‘’Our open Innovation Exchange program is very simple and quick in that when we engage with partners, the main purpose of what we are doing is to understand their problems, what are the problems they are trying to solve and their inability to solve them. We do this to ensure that our projects have wider socio-economic benefits that will not only give commercial benefit to our partners but the world at large. In essence, we find technical challenges and launch them using our innovation exchange program as it allows our partners to find new solutions in unexpected places.’’

With a goal to help African companies find innovative solutions to technical problems that their traditional supply chains cannot solve, Innovate UK through its Open Innovation exchange program has a deep sector expertise of 200+ innovation experts across 20 key economic sectors, a network of +45,000 unique organisations, c.80% SMEs, 234,000 innovators in the UK and 40+ countries. These only corroborate my point earlier that Large and small organisations are constantly in search of solutions and innovations that can solve their challenges.

Global Alliance Africa is a six-year project funded by UK International Development through Innovate UK and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).