What is innovation as a service?

Innovation as a service is a model where a company hires an external partner to run part of its innovation process: finding technology, testing it, or building and launching a solution. The partner supplies the method, the network and the people. You supply the strategic problem and the decision.

It is sometimes shortened to IaaS. That abbreviation usually means infrastructure as a service, the cloud computing model, so spell it out if there is any chance of confusion.

Innovation as a service exists because innovation capability is expensive to own. Hiring a scouting team, building a startup pipeline and learning what good looks like takes years. Buying access to someone else’s takes weeks.

Should you build in house or partner?

You have two options, and they trade speed against control.

Build in house

You control every stage, from strategy to launch, and the work stays tied to your business. It also takes time. You have to hire people who have done it before, and those people are competing for offers from companies that already have a track record in it.

Partner.

You start in weeks rather than quarters, and you keep your own team focused on what it is already good at. The risk is distance. An external partner does not sit in your strategy meetings, so the brief has to be sharp or the output drifts.

In practice, only the largest institutions own the full process. For everyone else the question is not whether to bring someone in, but which someone.

The four types of innovation partner

1. Consulting firms

Consultancies, from boutiques to the Big Four (KPMG, Deloitte, EY, PwC), sell innovation strategy. They will help you assess priorities, map opportunities and threats, and teach you a method such as design thinking.

They are strong on the bigger picture. They are weaker on two things: vertical depth and execution. Most have an innovation practice rather than a fintech practice, and few have built and shipped a product recently. That means you will need a second partner for delivery.

Choose a consultancy when you are writing your first innovation strategy, usually after a market shock or when an existing growth line is flattening.

2. Open innovation platforms

Open innovation platforms connect you to startups directly. You post a problem, or browse, and find a company that might solve it.

They are the cheapest option, because you do most of the work. Most platforms do not include scouting, so nobody filters the list for you. You need to already know what solution you want and have enough sector knowledge to tell a real product from a demo.

Choose a platform when your strategy is settled and you only need to find the specific technology to execute it.

Related reading: Startup scouting: how to do it properly

3. Research and technology institutions

This is the long horizon option. Rather than buying a solution that exists, you fund the research that creates one, usually by sponsoring doctoral programmes or research projects. In return you get exclusive access to intellectual property you can take to market.

It signals industry leadership and it produces genuinely new ideas. It is also expensive and slow, and it returns nothing for years.

Choose it when you have no deadline and product differentiation over a decade matters more than a result this year.

4. Innovation partners that are also investors

The fourth option is a partner that knows one vertical properly, maintains a live pipeline of startups in it, and matches you to the few that fit your problem. What separates this group from the platforms is that they also run money. They are in the market as investors, not just as intermediaries.

That second job is what you are really buying. An investor has to answer a harder question than “does this solve the brief.” They have to answer whether the company will still exist in three years, whether the team survives contact with a real customer, and whether the numbers hold up. A partner who asks those questions weekly about their own positions asks them about your shortlist too.

This is what Tenity does, centred on fintech and reaching into the sectors around it. It suits most corporates, whether you have a strategy yet or not, because the entry point can be a single scouting sprint or a multi year partnership.

How to choose the right one

Five questions. Answer them honestly and the shortlist writes itself.

1. Do you need help writing the strategy, or executing it? If the strategy does not exist yet, you need a partner that leads on it: a consultancy, or a sector specialist that also does strategic work. If it exists, skip to execution.
2. What do you already have in house? List what you have: strategic talent, product development, testing, route to market. Outsource only the gaps. If the gap is sector specific product knowledge, buy exactly that and nothing more.
3. What is the budget, and what does doing nothing cost? The second half of that question is the one people skip. A tight budget is a reason to narrow scope, not a reason to defer the decision by a year.
4. What is the timeline? Need something in market this year? A platform or a matching partner gets you there. No deadline? Research partnerships pay off over a longer period.
5. Do they know your industry? A consultancy may know the method without knowing your regulator. If you need execution in financial services, your partner needs to understand the regulation, the incumbents and who is actually shipping.

Why corporates work with Tenity

Tenity came out of corporate innovation at SIX, the Swiss Stock Exchange, in 2015 and went independent in 2018. We have worked with 80+ corporations and count 100+ corporate partners. We are fintech first and work across financial innovation and the sectors it reaches into, we are in the market as an early stage investor as well as a partner, and we match corporates to startups directly rather than routing everyone through the same programme.

Two things follow from that.

You get matched to startups, not enrolled in a programme

We do not sell one shape of engagement. Most of our corporate work now starts with a defined business challenge and ends with a small set of companies that can act on it.

An example process looks like this:

1. Challenge definition. We frame the business problem or investment thesis with you.
2. Shortlisting. We identify and vet startups globally against your criteria, usually somewhere around 15 to 20.
3. Selection. We narrow it down with you, typically to about five.
4. Working sessions. Your team and the founders sit down together and work through real use cases in depth. Nobody is pitching. The question on the table is whether there is an actual application here, and both sides have to answer it.
5. Decision support. You get a summary, recommendations and next steps.

How much of that you need is up to you. Some partners arrive with the challenge already framed and want the shortlist. Others start further back. Treat the sequence as a default we adapt, not a template we apply.

Where a structured programme is the right answer, we run one. Visa Innovation Program Europe and the Singapore Financial Infrastructure Innovation Program with Ripple are both currently live. Both were designed around a specific partner’s objective.

More on the model: Innovation services

You get depth in fintech, and in what fintech touches

We are fintech first. That is the centre of gravity. But finance connects to almost everything, so the work follows it outward, into insurance, digital health and sustainability.

What those have in common is complexity. Legacy infrastructure, procurement that runs for quarters, risk functions with a veto, integration into systems nobody wants to touch, and regulation on the challenges where it applies. Deployment is where these collaborations are won and lost.

We have run 250 proofs of concept and we keep a database of 1,600 startups. That is what buys you the thing a generalist cannot offer: people who know what a bank or an insurer can actually put into production.

You get an investor’s read, and early access to what we backed

Tenity runs two engines. We invest early in fintech companies, and we build innovation partnerships with corporates. They share a pipeline and they inform each other, but they are not the same activity, and it is worth being precise about how they connect.

When we shortlist startups against your challenge, we are not just recommending companies we hold a position in. We pick on fit. What carries across from the fund is the standard of assessment. We look at your shortlist the way we look at a deal, because that is the muscle we use every week.

That matters because of how these collaborations actually fail. It is rarely a bad demo. It is a good demo from a company that runs out of runway nine months into your procurement cycle.

The access runs the other way too. Our corporate partners see the companies we have invested in early, before the broader market does, and they see our deal flow. We manage $140M+ in assets, so that pipeline is a live position rather than a list. And where a specific opportunity warrants it, we can invest in a startup we have introduced you to, or invest alongside you. That is a decision on its own merits rather than the way the model works by default.

More on the investment side: Venture capital at Tenity and our portfolio.

Example: how SIX brought a climate solution to its bank clients

bLink is SIX’s open banking platform, built to connect Swiss banks with fintech companies. Banks use it to offer their own clients products they did not build, such as accounts or wealth management tools, through APIs.

The bLink team wanted to add an ESG solution and did not have a candidate. We scouted for one. Deedster, a Stockholm climate fintech that turns transaction data into a CO2 footprint calculator, came through our programme, and bLink met them there. After a pitch event and a use case review, the two ran a proof of concept on anonymised data. It worked, and Swiss banks on the platform were able to offer the calculator to their customers.

That is the shape of the work: a corporate with a defined gap, a filtered set of candidates, a structured test, a decision.

The right partner depends on what you are missing

There is no best type of innovation partner. There is the one that fits the gap you actually have, the maturity you actually have, and the deadline you actually have.

If you work somewhere complex enough that good ideas die in deployment, the shortlist narrows fast. Generalists know method. Platforms know volume. Neither knows your industry, or which of the forty companies claiming to solve your problem has a product that will survive your procurement process.

Talk to us about the problem you are trying to solve.