Building everything in-house is the right answer for some AI capabilities. For most, it is simply too slow. The organisations moving fastest in the AI era are not the ones with the biggest internal R&D teams. They are the ones that have learned to source, structure, and absorb innovation from outside their walls.
Before you engage any external partner, you need a map. We help you define the innovation ecosystem your organisation should be operating in. We help you assess which startup communities, research institutions, technology verticals, and geographic markets are relevant to your AI strategy, and which are noise
For organisations operating in technically complex domains the right AI capability often exists first in academic or research settings, not in the commercial market.
We design and structure R&D alliances that give your organisation early access to emerging capabilities: joint research agreements, university partnership frameworks, consortium participation, and IP co-development arrangements.
Signing a pilot agreement with a startup that has no enterprise deployment experience, or running a proof of concept that goes nowhere because integration was never planned, wastes time.
We design startup engagement models that are structured to convert.
Acquiring a technology company is the fastest way to bring an AI capability in-house. It is also the easiest way to destroy it.
We work with strategy and innovation teams at the front end of the acquisition process — before the term sheet — to define what you are actually buying, what you need to preserve to make it worth what you paid, and how the acquired capability connects to the internal operating model.
Sometimes the capability you need is not a product or a platform. It is a team — a small group of people who have spent three years solving a problem that is now strategically central to your AI roadmap.
We design acqui-hire processes that protect what makes the team valuable: structuring the talent retention framework, defining the mandate and autonomy the team will have inside the acquirer, and designing the incentive architecture that keeps them building rather than leaving.
Open innovation strategy engagements typically begin with a three to four week diagnostic: what external capabilities does your AI strategy genuinely require, and what is the current state of your ecosystem relationships. This produces a prioritised action plan across the partnership mechanisms most relevant to your situation.
From there, we work alongside your strategy, innovation, and corporate development teams to execute — designing the engagement models, running partner selection processes, structuring agreements, and building the internal governance that makes external innovation stick.
Engagements range from focused advisory on a specific mechanism (a startup programme, a single acquisition) to a full ecosystem strategy covering multiple partnership types over a six to twelve month period.
This service is designed for strategy, innovation, and corporate development leaders in large organisations who are under pressure to accelerate AI capability faster than internal development alone allows. It works best when there is executive clarity that external innovation is a strategic priority and when there is budget authority to move from strategy to execution.
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