Crossinnovation

Cross-innovation refers to the practice of combining knowledge, methods, and technologies from different disciplines, industries, or sectors to generate novel products, services, or processes. It emphasizes boundary-spanning collaboration and the integration of diverse perspectives to address complex problems.

The approach typically involves cross-disciplinary teams, cross-sector partnerships, and open or collaborative forms of innovation such as co-creation, living labs, and pilot projects. It relies on knowledge transfer across domains, modular design, interoperable standards, and shared experimentation platforms. Methods often include design thinking, rapid prototyping, and shared governance structures to manage intellectual property and risk.

The aims of cross-innovation include increasing novelty and value, accelerating development cycles, expanding market opportunities, and enhancing organizational resilience. It can help diversify risk by exploring multiple use cases and business models, while enabling more flexible responses to changing market and regulatory conditions.

Barriers to cross-innovation include organizational silos, misaligned incentives, intellectual property concerns, regulatory constraints, cultural differences, and funding fragmentation. Enablers include strong leadership commitment, ecosystem building, common languages and standards, data sharing arrangements, modular architectures, interoperable interfaces, trusted governance, and supportive public policies or funding mechanisms.

Applications span technology development, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, urban development, education, and sustainability. Examples include collaborations between automotive and software industries to advance connected mobility, and partnerships between life sciences and data science to advance precision medicine. In practice, cross-innovation seeks to leverage complementarities across fields to achieve outcomes that would be unlikely within a single domain.