Opening the Funnel — Lumen Coatings' Open-Innovation Turnaround

A four-round, advanced open-innovation and technology-strategy simulation set inside Lumen Coatings NV, a €240M specialty-chemicals firm in the Port of Antwerp, Belgium. Lumen develops high-performance functional coatings, spends €19.2M a year on R&D (8% of revenue) and holds 140 patents — but commercialises fewer than 30% of them, leaving ~98 dormant on the shelf: the textbook symptom of a closed, not-invented-here model. On 14 January 2026 a Dutch rival, AquaShield BV, launches a self-cleaning marine hull coating by licensing in a university spin-out's enzyme technology and co-developing the rest — the exact value proposition of Lumen's flagship internal project Tritón, still 14 months from launch. A first mover captures 55–60% of a €22M premium segment; Lumen has already sunk €8.4M into Tritón and faces a board deadline of one budget cycle to demonstrate a credible open-innovation turnaround or have R&D strategy outsourced. Playing the new Head of Innovation, you operationalise Vanhaverbeke's open-innovation framework across four rounds. Round 1: diagnose where the funnel is too narrow — at the front (no inbound, few external ideas entering) and at the side (no outbound, dormant IP dying on the shelf) — and make the Tritón call: kill, finish closed, or pivot to inbound licensing. Round 2: allocate the €19.2M R&D budget across openness modes (build internally, license in, co-develop, crowdsource, out-license), select partners from a slate of five (the spin-out, a Korean shipyard, an accelerator, a CRO, a complementary coatings firm) under capability, cost, reliability and strategic-leakage trade-offs, and confirm the Tritón inbound deal (€2.8M upfront + 6% royalty, launch in 8 months). Round 3: set the IP and deal terms that determine value capture — exclusivity, field-of-use carve-outs, royalty structure and the core-vs-periphery boundary — license out at least three dormant patents, and respond to the escalation event: AquaShield's same-day bid to buy the spin-out exclusively. Round 4: build the operating model and governance (inbound-scouting function, out-licensing desk, KPIs) that sustains openness against the not-invented-here culture, and pitch it to the board. The math rewards selective, strategy-led openness — inbound for speed, outbound to monetise dormant IP, watertight IP terms, a defended core and a real operating model — and punishes the five classic errors: defaulting to closed, hoarding all IP, opening without terms, over-opening the core, and shipping deals with no operating model. Final KPIs track external-idea yield (% of pipeline value sourced externally), time-to-market (months), R&D ROI and partner-network value realised (€M).