Open Innovation in “Reverse Pitching” Style: When Businesses Reveal Their Own Challenges

09/11/25 04:11:53 View: 0

In 2025, nine experts from the LIF Global 2025 program in Vietnam sat down with Ho Guom Group to tackle a very specific bottleneck: reducing product congestion on a garment production line. The most remarkable part wasn’t the technical challenge itself, but how the problem was framed: the business deliberately opened its problem to a community of innovators, inviting experts from diverse fields to dissect, propose solutions, and assess feasibility—right on the spot.

This is reverse pitching—where the business presents its “pain point,” and the innovation community responds with solutions—reversing the typical model where startups “pitch” to seek investment or pilot opportunities.

What Is Reverse Pitching and Why Does It Matter?

Reverse pitching is a shortcut mechanism in open innovation: instead of filtering through hundreds of ideas far removed from real issues, the business defines a well-scoped challenge (problem/data zone/process point) and invites external partners to propose contextual solutions.

From an innovation economics perspective, reverse pitching dramatically reduces information transaction costs: both sides spend less time guessing intentions, minimize mismatch risks, and shorten the PoC → pilot → scale cycle.

The Ho Guom case highlighted the value of multidisciplinary collaboration. If only AI teams were involved, they might have proposed cameras, computer vision, and dashboards. But with experts in physical sensors, process engineering, healthcare, and materials, solutions expanded to weight sensors at bottlenecks, barcode/QR tracking for semi-finished products, and reconfiguring workflow rhythm using minimal viable data.

The real value didn’t come from a single technology—it came from restructuring operational processes through accessible, actionable data.

How the World Is Advancing with “Open Problems – Shared Solutions”

From 2017 to mid-2025, many global platforms and corporations have standardized this approach:

MIT Solve has hosted over 95 open innovation challenges, collecting more than 26,800 solutions from 185 countries—proof of global “intelligence orchestration” (MIT Solve, 2025).
In smart cities, the Smart City Expo ecosystem annually publishes challenges co-led by city authorities and companies, significantly increasing real-world piloting rates (Catalan Smart City OI Challenge, 2025).
In energy, Elia Group runs annual Open Innovation Challenges, receiving hundreds of proposals on AI grid optimization, safety, and sustainability. Crucially, their process links every challenge directly to integration steps—proposal → data-based PoC → system entry if criteria met (Elia Group Innovation, 2025).

Success rates—measured by ideas turning into commercial applications—hover around 10–20%. While that seems modest, it’s far higher than traditional in-house R&D, where many projects “die in the lab” (GreyB, 2024). Failures often stem from vague challenge definitions, no data sandbox, unclear integration ownership, or ambiguous IP rules (Innosabi, 2023; 2080 Ventures, 2025).

Vietnam: From “Talking About Open” to “Designing for Open”

Vietnam has hosted many hackathons and idea contests—but reverse pitching represents a shift in posture: the business publicly commits to the challenge, provides data and process ownership, and offers a clear path to P&L if the PoC succeeds.

LIF Global 2025 in Vietnam exemplifies this. Nine innovators from AI, biotech, healthcare, and construction collaborated with a specific enterprise. With VNU CSK (Center for Knowledge Transfer and Startup Support) and KisStartup acting as intermediaries, the problem was not only heard but translated into technical, data, and KPI terms.

Unlike traditional ideation events, this reverse pitching session was implementation-ready:

Weight sensors could be installed without overhauling the line.
Barcode tracking of semi-finished goods was low-cost and quick.
Pilot tests could run within 2–4 weeks on a small production subset.

The key question was: who owns the data and who has authority to change the workflow? If these roles don’t align, the project stalls in the approval stage.

Why Many “Open” Programs Burn Cash Without Reaching Production

Three recurring friction points emerge:

Goal Misalignment: Businesses aim to reduce WIP or shorten lead time by 15%, while solution teams seek to “showcase technology.” Without agreeing on measurable value units (e.g., wait time per station, % of WIP over threshold), both sides speak different languages.
No Data Sandbox & Vague IP Rules: Without controlled environments or clear data usage policies, projects remain stuck in simulation.
No Integration Path: After PoC, there’s no defined owner, interface, or maintenance cost—leading to “zombie PoCs.”

Successful programs, by contrast, bundle the challenge and integration path together:

LEGO turns ideas from LEGO Ideas into real products.
Elia predefines “go-live” criteria.
In biopharma, companies like BMS source over 60% of new products from external partnerships thanks to mature integration systems (GreyB, 2024).

How to “Open” Effectively—Not Just Aesthetically

A minimal process alignment helps businesses and startups collaborate without friction:

The enterprise frames the challenge at the operational level: one position, one KPI, one target benefit, one data owner.
They publish a one-page IP & data policy—covering anonymization, retention, PoC results ownership, and no lock-in clauses.
Startups commit to time-to-value: how soon can they produce actionable insights (e.g., congestion heatmap, wait-time chart per station) rather than promising full systems.

Once both sides agree on measurable value, PoC moves quickly to pilot. Yet many fail here because traditional procurement doesn’t allow “unrated” suppliers. Global best practice introduces a venture client lane—a small, fast-track procurement channel with real paid trials, short contracts (6–10 pages), and controlled budgets.

When “Open” Meets Finance: Secondary Markets, ROI, and Portfolio Discipline

Many open programs fail because they’re treated as spending exceptions—outside financial discipline. Globally, corporations have professionalized this area.

In Corporate Venture Capital (CVC), about 22% of funds now use the secondary market to resell equity, generating early liquidity and recycling capital into new challenges. “Open” here extends beyond technology—it’s about opening financial and portfolio mindsets to prevent capital gridlock.

However, reverse pitching and open challenges don’t necessarily require CVC. The venture client model—becoming the first paying customer—delivers faster integration and higher production adoption rates. The two models are complementary:

CVC buys future options,
Venture client buys immediate impact.

What Did Ho Guom Group Learn in One Morning?

Frame the problem correctly: identify a specific bottleneck, accept “good-enough” data, design small, reversible pilots.
Value multidisciplinary thinking: combining sensors, barcodes, and rhythm adjustment often beats a one-size-fits-all AI.
Ensure organizational commitment: without data ownership and authority to act, pilots freeze at the report stage.

A 90-day roadmap is realistic:

2 weeks for congestion dashboard setup,
2–4 weeks for rhythm adjustments and scaling,
4–6 weeks for minimal integration into production reporting.

The core issue isn’t what technology to use—but whether the learning–doing–measuring cycle is safeguarded by an internal venture client lane.

“Open” Doesn’t Mean Chaos—it Means Framing the Rules

At the strategic level, disciplined openness defines boundaries: which data can be shared, how long trials last, what “go-live” means, and who owns results.
At the operational level, it shortens time-to-value and prioritizes solutions that are “small enough to test, cheap enough to fail, and clear enough to measure.”
At the cultural level, it rewards teams that admit “we’re wrong here” and adjust when data proves it.

The world has moved past the era of isolated innovation. Open innovation ecosystems and public challenge platforms are shaping the future. In Vietnam, initiatives like the reverse pitching sessions under LIF Global 2025 are timely steps—transforming “talking about open” into designing for openness, and reframing startups from “contestants” into partners in solving real problems.

References

Catalan Smart City Open Innovation Challenge. (2025). Open innovation challenges. Retrieved from

https://www.b2match.com/e/smartcity-openinnovationchallenge-catalansolut...

Vietnamese Businesses “Reverse Pitch” for the First Time to Source Ideas from the Outside

https://khoahocphattrien.vn/su-kien/doanh-nghiep-viet-lan-dau-pitching-n...

Elia Group Innovation. (2025). Open Innovation Challenge 2025. Retrieved from

https://innovation.eliagroup.eu/en/how-we-work/open-innovation-challenge...

GreyB. (2024). 7 open innovation challenges to avoid. Retrieved from

https://www.greyb.com/blog/7-open-innovation-challenges-to-avoid/

Innosabi. (2023). Challenges in open innovation. Retrieved from

https://www.innosabi.com/resources/post/challenges-in-open-innovation

MIT Solve. (2025). Challenges. Retrieved from