Learn to innovate with your strategic suppliers
Identify your strategic suppliers and involve them in innovation

The development of collaboration leading to collaborative innovation requires an adaptation of actors' practices aimed at overcoming short-term individual interests in favor of long-term collective interests. Already in the 1980s, the existence of a dependency between product development and suppliers appeared to be a determining factor in the progress of development projects. Suppliers can improve concepts, influence product architecture and suggest more suitable or safer technologies. However, your suppliers' innovative ideas can only have an impact on your products if they share the gains and risks with you. These are the so-called strategic suppliers.

As a rule, the number of such partners is quite small. By drawing on the concrete results of the practices explained in this fact sheet, based on studies carried out in major industrial groups, you will be in a...