Open or Closed? — Brennaro Sistemi's Open-Innovation Portfolio

A four-round, advanced innovation-strategy simulation set inside Brennaro Sistemi S.p.A., a Milan-headquartered industrial-technology firm (EUR 720M revenue, 11% R&D-to-revenue, 210 patent families) designing precision electric-drive and power-electronics systems for e-mobility, robotics and automation. The board has handed the R&D chief a hard EUR 24M discretionary innovation budget and a 12-month horizon to make three partly-irreversible technology decisions together — for the first time with open-innovation discipline. Three of Brennaro's patent families cover a silicon-carbide (SiC) inverter-control architecture two years ahead of rivals but largely idle (~EUR 0 revenue). A Japanese tier-1 has offered EUR 9M upfront plus a 3% royalty to license it out; a German competitor is rumoured nine months from a rival 800V platform; and the licence offer expires in six weeks. Playing the Chief Technology / R&D Officer, you (1) map the technology portfolio on strategic centrality vs internal capability, producing the open/closed grid; (2) design the outbound SiC licence-out — field-of-use carve-outs, exclusivity, royalty floor — to bank the EUR 9M without arming a competitor in robotics, your own backyard; (3) make a disciplined make/buy/ally choice under the cap, allocating across the EUR 16M in-house 800V build and the thermal-management gap (EUR 6M alliance / EUR 11M minority equity + access / EUR 30M acquisition that busts the cap); and (4) integrate the three into one technology-leverage strategy and defend a blended ROI, a time-to-market inside the EV window, and an IP-risk register to the board. The math is built on Frattini's open-innovation and technology-leverage research: it rewards licensing-out a non-core idle asset with field-of-use protection, using the licence cash to fund inbound, choosing the staged equity-plus-access option over an unaffordable acquisition, and keeping a defensible core — and it measurably punishes the five classic errors: the closed-innovation reflex (build everything, miss the window), reckless broad licensing (arm a rival), IP hoarding (decline and let the asset age), buying when access suffices (bust the budget), and three deals with no portfolio logic. Final KPIs track Strategic Value (blended ROI), IP Defensibility, Time-to-Market against the 9-month competitor and the 18-month build, and Budget committed against the EUR 24M cap.