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“Not all smart people work for you”, is the famous phrase said by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystem. Companies know this, and that’s why the most innovative ones are constantly scouting idea and make networking with the external environment.

However, carrying on constantly a deeper relationship with the external partners requires spending time searching for disruptive innovations that could matche with the company's strategy. This implies that an innovative company, with the aim to exchange resources with external stakeholders, has dedicated teams that are devoted to discovering smart people and ideas. And on the contrary what most of the companies believe, this vision, where adequately supported by the management, increase employees’ productivity.

A recent research from Imperial College London, conducted on 615 employees belonging two group of senior technical experts of the most innovative company of our century, IBM, explains us how innovation dedicated team operate, leading to the firm to access at the greater innovations.

This innovation management is one of the pillars of the IBM open innovation strategy: in 2016, the company were granted more than 22 patents per day and became the first firm to pass 8.000 patents awarded in a single year.

Having a dedicated team to discover innovation is not sufficient. What marks a real difference is autonomy, time spent to cultivate and learn from network and importation of knowledge acquired internally.

First, this groups of experts have a strong autonomy on how they search for new ideas, who they interact with, and how they spend their working time. One expert said: “Our job is to figure out what the next [thing] is, to sift all the possible things, which ones are going to matter to IBM and then go out and figure out what is really happening and come back with recommendations…Why we think this matters, how we think this is going to play out and where IBM should fit in”.  This means that executives have trust in their team and in their capabilities to perform.

Second, having a dedicated team is not sufficient, if the team does not have the adequate time to acquire, learn and transform external inputs in innovative projects for the company. Even if an “innovation scouter” has a broad external network, only when he devoted enough time and attention to those resources the process is fruitful. The research show that only when employees allocate almost half of their time outside the organization are effectively able to import innovation inside the company. Investing on cultivating a broad external network is the first step. If employees do not spend adequate time learning how to use information and knowledge gained, costs of being distant from company for engaging in networking is outweighed benefits of identifying new information sources.  Executives thus need to ensure that innovation scouters not only devote sufficient time to networking externally but also set as a priority as well absorbing and applying what they learn, to diffuse it internally.

The last point privileges an internal point of view. An open innovation strategy is a balanced mix of internal and external resources. Companies need to not only expose themselves to external contamination but also increase internal attitude to innovate. This means that managers have to connect external knowledge with those are working inside the company, is fundamental reflecting the broader network created on the internal knowledge.

Thus, managers have to pair their external networker to their more internally focused colleagues, to achieve the best of both worlds: leveraging the external sourcing of ideas and connecting them with skilled internal brokers who can perhaps better direct the application of novel ideas.