Open Italy

Open Italy is Elis’ Innovation ecosystem developed with the objective to encourage dialogue and collaboration between large companies, Italian startups / SMEs and innovation enablers such as accelerators, research centers, venture capitalists and young talents through  innovation projects.

Open Italy is an innovation ecosystem that facilitates innovation across Italian organizations. The phases of the program are divided as follows: 

• Discover and sharing: 50 large companies share their internal innovation needs with the community during the exploration phase of the program. 
• Scouting: Innovative startups, SMEs and innovation enablers are selected together by the program's partners and are evaluated by a panel of experts. Demo Days and one-to-one meetings are held to initiate matchmaking.
• Co-Innovation: Corporates are invited to develop collaborative experiences with the startups, SMEs or Innovation Enablers on a Proof of Concept to validate ideas. 
• Growth: After the co-innovation stage, corporates begin to understand how that can scale opportunities with the entities. 

To help facilitate the Open Italy program Elis wanted to enable a digital platform that would enable the organization to launch calls for innovation and allow it to effectively manage its ecosystem. 

Skipso was able to build an innovation platform that would meet all of the organizations exact requirements. 

Open Italy took advantage of the all of Skipso modular innovation solutions to build a powerful platform that could facilitate all the activities of the program: 

• Open Calls and Challenges: Open Italy uses the Open Calls and Challenges module to run all of iCalls for Innovation to find innovative Startups, SMEs and Innovation Enablers. Companies outline their business needs across profile pages and applications are taken through a simple form submission to propose their solutions. 
• Idea and Portfolio Management: During the ideation and selection phase the Idea and Portfolio management module is enabled to help take projects down a stage-gated pipeline. Here judges and mentors are easily able to evaluate projects, while applicants are able to be notified through automatic emails the requirements of each stage of the program. 
• Innovation Ecosystem: The Innovation Ecosystem module allows Elis to store a directory of all the users on the platform and allows users to connect and collaborate. The directory also enables the organization to post key resources and events. 

In addition to enabling all the platform modules Skipso’s design studio has worked to build an interface for the platform optimized for user experience.

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