Orchestrating innovation: turning collaboration into innovation


Societal challenges such as the energy transition, digital sovereignty and creating a healthy and safe living environment cannot be solved by a single organisation. Successful innovation requires collaboration between businesses, public authorities, knowledge institutions and users.

Orchestrating Innovation is an approach that helps organisations shape and develop this type of collaboration. It brings stakeholders together around a shared societal challenge and helps them jointly develop, implement and scale up innovations.

Why is orchestrating innovation needed?

Many innovations never progress beyond a pilot or a promising idea. This is not because the technology is lacking, but because there is insufficient collaboration, investment, regulation, knowledge or shared direction. Collaboration does not happen automatically either, particularly when there is no clear owner of the problem.

Orchestrating Innovation helps overcome these barriers. By connecting stakeholders around a shared goal, it provides a basis for tackling complex societal challenges together and successfully putting innovations into practice.

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Working towards a shared vision

At a time of major transitions, no single organisation has all the resources, knowledge or influence needed to deliver change on its own. Organisations are part of a wider system in which success depends on the actions of others.

That is why Orchestrating Innovation starts by developing a shared ambition. Businesses, public authorities and knowledge institutions work together on themes such as sustainability, health, safety and future earning capacity to create solutions they could not achieve independently. The central question is not what one organisation needs, but what is required to move the shared challenge forwards.

Our orchestrators

TNO supports organisations with experienced orchestrators and practical methods. Our experts combine expertise in:

  • Innovation management
  • Transition and systems change
  • Governance and policy development
  • Ecosystem development
  • Business model development and validation
  • Public-private partnerships

The five phases of orchestrating innovation

Every collaboration develops differently, but most go through a number of recognisable phases.

Phase 1 – explore and prepare

We map the societal challenge, the stakeholders involved and the opportunities for collaboration. This provides insight into which parties are needed to make change possible.

Phase 2 – initiate and connect

Stakeholders define a shared ambition, agree how they will work together, and organise the initial resources and funding.

Phase 3 – organise and deliver

Governance arrangements are established, innovations are tested, and the collaboration is placed on a sustainable footing. Partners work together to deliver tangible results.

Phase 4 – grow and scale up

In the fourth and final phase we monitor and analyse the functioning of the ecosystem and progress towards the innovation goal. We carry out analyses and make adjustments. After all, no two journeys are the same, ecosystems do not always work as expected, and developments never stand still.

Phase 5 - embed or conclude

Results are embedded in organisations, policy and infrastructure, or the collaboration is deliberately brought to a close once its objective has been achieved.

From collaboration to impact

Orchestrating Innovation is applied in a wide range of settings, including innovation coalitions, living labs, field labs, campuses and regional innovation ecosystems. TNO uses this approach in national and regional partnerships in fields including high tech, healthcare, sustainability, construction and cybersecurity.

The underlying principle remains the same: helping organisations build collective momentum where individual parties cannot do so alone.