Managing ELIS’s Open Innovation ecosystem with a single platform

ELIS is a non-profit organisation founded in the 1960s with the mission of promoting economic and social development through work and training. Over time it created ELIS Innovation Hub, an ecosystem connecting large companies, startups, universities and research centres.

Its flagship programme is Open Italy, running for 10 years: corporates express innovation needs, ELIS facilitates matching with startups and solution providers, and supports the development of proofs of concept. Today the consortium involves over 130 companies and works with hundreds of startups and SMEs.

To run Open Italy, ELIS Innovation Hub had relied over the years on a technology platform for managing the ecosystem and its processes. The programme’s growth and the evolution of its collaborative dynamics prompted the Hub to broaden the model and build a technology solution that was more responsive and easier for the Open Innovation team to govern.

The goal was to build a new platform, called OneSquare, that would make it possible to manage the entire innovation cycle in a single environment (needs collection, matchmaking, calls for solutions, events, prototyping journeys), offer a more engaging experience for corporates and startups, with a modern interface and collaboration features, and become the centre of ELIS’s business, not just for Open Italy but for all its innovation programmes.

What was needed was a modular, customisable platform, ready in a short time.

To achieve these goals, blendX became the technology infrastructure behind OneSquare. The platform integrates four main modules.

Needs collection and management: employees of the consortium’s companies can propose innovation needs. Innovation managers screen them and decide how to address them: matchmaking with startups, global scouting via the Tech Radar, or PoCs supported by ELIS.

Matchmaking: the startups on the platform see the published needs and can apply. AI automatically ranks the needs by match probability, speeding up the process.

Tech Radar: an artificial intelligence engine that analyses up to 36 million companies worldwide, both to identify the technology solutions most relevant to the expressed needs and to let companies carry out their own scouting.

Corporate-to-corporate collaboration: if two companies have similar needs, the platform fosters connections and makes it possible, with the support of the ELIS team, to address similar needs together.

• Platform developed and taken live in 3 months
• 200 people onboarded onto OneSquare within two weeks of launch
• First matches between needs and solution providers already under way
• OneSquare is designed to become a digital platform around which company processes and knowledge revolve
• The strategic value of the project led ELIS Innovation Hub to regard blendX as a key asset for its industrial plan, taking a minority stake in the company: a long-term strategic partnership to bring innovation to large Italian corporates together