Open Innovation: adding value to society, together

Around the world, market and consumer demands are evolving at ever-greater speeds while environmental challenges increasingly demand cross-value-chain efforts. At the same time, digital technologies are democratizing research and development – expanding access to new skills, thinking, and technologies. Open innovation allows stakeholders and partners to work together to redefine what is possible.

Outside of Stahl, there are enormous amounts of available information that offer value for our people, products, and processes. By embracing open innovation, we can tap into this value to tackle key sustainability challenges and make our innovation processes faster and more efficient, and our solutions more impactful.

Building on our strong track record of co-creation and development, we aim to collaborate with a wide range of partners. Open innovation offers us the opportunity to innovate more efficiently, explore new markets, better address customer demands, and improve the environmental impact of our solutions. So that we can add value to all our stakeholders, including society at large. 

Our open innovation framework

At Stahl, we have developed a framework to further activate our open innovation ambitions. We have identified key areas in which our capabilities allow us to seize opportunities for positive impact:

• Renewable feedstocks: our strong biotechnology partnerships will help us explore and engage with renewable, restorative, and regenerative chemistry, facilitating the move away from non-renewable carbon feedstocks.
• Water quality: through close partnerships, we can co-develop solutions that reduce water consumption and pollution and enable water-based products.
• Advanced functional chemistry: by tapping into external expertise, we can better develop chemical solutions with key functional properties for a variety of industries.

Within our framework, we want to create a matrix organization that is ready to co-create internally and engage with diverse external partners across all sectors and locations – from commercial innovation partners and start-ups to research institutes and NGOs. At the same time, we will continue to monitor the external landscape for new developments foster strong relationships with leaders in key fields of interest. 

We also plan to implement strong onboarding processes and an open innovation portal – key steps that will allow us to facilitate efficient and secure collaborations while allocating resources efficiently and protecting our intellectual property.