Innovation Management & Open Innovation Strategy

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Challenge
A leading global beauty and personal care company aimed to strengthen its open innovation capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region to accelerate collaboration with startups, technology providers, and research institutions. The goal was to evolve from a traditional R&D-driven model to a more agile, partner-enabled innovation strategy aligned with sustainability, digitalization, and changing consumer expectations.

To enable this transition, the client needed a clear understanding of how open innovation is structured and executed across high-performing global organizations, and how to adapt these insights to its regional operations.

Approach
We conducted a strategic benchmarking and advisory engagement, analyzing how several industry peers implement and scale open innovation. The analysis focused on engagement models, organizational structures, funding mechanisms, and regional footprints across APAC.

Our approach combined secondary research with primary interviews, emphasizing:

• Open innovation governance and team structures
• Innovation stages (ideation to commercialization) and partner engagement models
• Venture building, co-development, and startup collaboration pathways
• Roles of regional hubs such as Singapore and China in innovation execution

The study also examined budgetary triggers, decision-making thresholds, and the autonomy granted to regional teams to pursue OI initiatives.

Results
The engagement delivered a tailored strategic playbook to inform the client's open innovation setup in APAC. It offered practical recommendations on how to structure governance, select partners, and allocate resources effectively.

The findings are now being used to shape the client's regional innovation model—empowering local teams to lead with agility while maintaining alignment with global innovation goals.