Bringing innovation inside an established firm, even one that has created novel ideas in the past, is not as simple as just purchasing bundled external knowledge and expecting it to work wonders at headquarters right away.

Enel CEO Francesco Starace’s mandate was to create long-term sustainable value for all stakeholders. For the energy giant to incorporate novel products and ideas from outside its own business units, chief innovability officer Ernesto Ciorra used open innovation, which required systemic changes in the culture and structure of the multinational. Ciorra’s innovability teams—blending innovation with sustainability—were integrated into each business line.

These teams were just a jumping-off point. As I detail in a recent case study, next, the firm began pulling external innovation into the company with a crowdsourcing innovation platform. Using “Open Innovability,” thousands of “solvers” were able to contribute solutions to important challenges. Instead of thinking outside the box, the company invited people from the outside to consider problems in ways that hadn’t yet been considered.

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