Open Alchemy

Open Alchemy is a new way to link up a supplier’s customer base to collaboratively create major new technologies. Facilitated by Innovaro, this project has so far involved fourteen diverse UK corporate clients of Oracle as well as several entrepreneurial small businesses from the technology and communications fields. 

Open Alchemy is a collaborative innovation project between diverse, non-competing UK clients of Oracle: Arup, BBC, BP, BT, Cancer Research UK, the Department for Transport, Interbrand, Lloyds TSB, NHS, Pfizer, Rolls Royce, Unilever, Virgin Atlantic and Vocalink.

Future trends

To kick off the project, the participating companies were asked to select a series of future trends that had a global impact - these were selected from a list generated by Innovaro, Europe’s leading innovation strategy company.

These trends were then narrowed down to four to give the companies a common starting point for idea generation:

Virtual Authenticity
Who do we trust more - CNN or Wikipedia? How, why and where will new brands be more authentic than existing ones?

Secure global identities
What will be the impact of absolute secure individual digital identities beyond banking, immigration and border control?

Small and distributed
Everything is shrinking and becoming less centralised - power, devices and networks - where is this taking us and what can we do?

Contextual content
As location-based services and customer data morph into personalised information provision, who wants what data where, and why?

NESTA and Oracle designed an online collaborative tool to make it easy for participating corporates to invite thinking on these themes from their colleagues, and to generate new ideas.

Reaction Chamber

The participating corporates met in June for a 24-hour collaborative workshop at NESTA, called the Reaction Chamber. Each corporate came armed with their top three ideas, based on the themed topics. These ideas acted as a starting point for further idea generation.

The corporates also worked with a range of SMEs, entrepreneurs and experts in each of the themed areas. This was facilitated by a team from Innovaro.

By the end of the workshop the group selected the best ideas from those put forward, and used them to generate a series of commercially viable concepts.

Various participants in the programme will collaborate to work-up five of these concepts into business plans by the end of July.

Reaction Chamber participants

Partners

	Oracle Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. It helps customers to manage their business systems and information with reliable, secure, and integrated technologies.
	Innovaro Innovaro is Europe’s leading innovation consulting and insight firm. It is facilitating the Open Alchemy process, using its methodology for future-growth mapping.