The State of Open Innovation 2026

For most of the last decade, "innovation management" meant a corporate platform, a fixed budget, and a small internal team deciding what counted as innovative. Open, peer-to-peer challenge platforms are changing that equation: instead of one team running one program, anyone — an individual, a startup, a university club, a corporate innovation office — can launch a challenge, invite participants, and bring in outside judges, all on the same platform and often within the same week.

This shift matters for three reasons. First, it lowers the cost of entry: a small team can run a real, well-structured innovation challenge without buying enterprise software or hiring a dedicated program manager. Second, it changes who gets to participate — roles like creator, participant, judge, sponsor, and mentor become things anyone can hold, per challenge, rather than fixed job titles inside one organisation. Third, it puts pressure on innovation programs to be genuinely fair and well-judged, since participants can compare their experience across many different challenges and platforms.

InnoBee was built around this shift. Rather than assuming there is one "right" challenge format, the platform supports 40+ challenge types — from rapid hackathons to formal pitch competitions to ISO 56001-aligned audits — because different organisations are trying to solve genuinely different problems. We expect this report to be the first in an ongoing series as we learn more from the challenges running on the platform.