OSCR was a Discover programme that was a collaboration between 100%Open, Orange, live|work and Wireless Innovation. It was a call for innovative products, services, solutions or business models that grow audience share, increase customer loyalty and create significant revenues (in excess of €20m over 3 years). Winning proposals that fit with the content areas of travel, personal finance, style, celebrity, cars and sport received investment from Orange.
The intellectual property in service innovations is notoriously difficult to protect and the programme therefore aimed to create long term business relationships between small firms and Orange. These embraced a range of different business models, including licensing, joint ventures or other forms of partnership.
OSCR launched in October 2009, attended by 150 interested potential smaller partners. 2 weeks later 85 responses to the brief were submitted to the Trusted Agents who selected the most promising 7 to enter the “airlock” to be developed. Each proposal was presented to Orange in January 2010, with a further 6 companies’ propositions already having been passed straight to Orange in a ‘fast track’.
In order to protect all of the partners, Orange had not seen any ideas until they left the “airlock”. Orange had 90 days to decide which ideas to pursue further. After this right of first refusal, those ideas that Orange rejects remain the intellectual property of the originator.
OSCR resulted in, amongst other things, a major new customer trial of a service called Last Second Tickets which is currently underway with 1 million Orange customers in the North West of the UK.
OSCR builds on NESTA’s experience of working with British Design Innovation on the Procter & Gamble Open Innovation Challenge, a project that explored open innovation dynamics where hard intellectual property in the form of patents was at issue.
