Welcome to Novable Voice, the space where we dive into how corporate innovation actually happens on the ground.

In this special three-part series, we sit down with Pierluigi Pelliccia, Project Manager at Orange, and Irene Violetta, Customer Success Manager at Novable, to pull back the curtain on a highly successful open innovation collaboration. Throughout 2026, Novable supported Orange across five scouting campaigns, analyzing 147 validated startups, shortlisting 78, and ultimately selecting six companies for active partnerships.

Here is a breakdown of their journey from strategy to real-world execution.

‍Part 1: The Corporate Perspective - Engaging Internal Teams First

Many corporations struggle to move from a Proof of Concept (POC) to full integration. Pierluigi explains that Orange realized their original bottom-up approach to innovation often resulted in internal teams dropping projects after the POC phase due to competing priorities or existing legacy tech.

To fix this, Orange completely reshaped their approach by involving internal teams from day one. Now, they start by directly asking internal teams what challenges they need solved, ensuring they are actively involved in validating the startup selection and testing the solution. This strategic shift guarantees that internal clients take ownership of the project once the scouting phase is over.

Part 2: The Magic Behind the Scenes - Combining AI and Human Expertise

While Novable leverages a powerful proprietary Deep Matching algorithm to find startups, Irene highlights that context and human expertise are what truly drive successful matches. AI is excellent at structuring information, but it requires human creativity to "connect the dots" across different industries.

A perfect example from their collaboration was a complex geomarketing challenge. Orange needed a tool to track their competitors' commercial activities and promotions on the ground in real-time. By brainstorming together, Irene and Pierluigi successfully reverse-engineered the problem and reframed the challenge to target mystery shopper and crowdsourcing startups. Startups like Smart Spotter and Roamler, typically used in the retail and restaurant sectors, proved to be the exact cross-industry solution Orange needed.

Part 3: Real-World Results - "Inspire, Innovate, and Play"

The collaboration culminated in Orange's Open Innovation Night, themed around using artificial intelligence as a creative partner and human enhancer. During the event, Orange showcased the six selected startup partners: Donna, Super Chat, Smart Spotter, Roamler, Druid, and Camunda.

One of the biggest success stories of the night was the serendipitous match with Donna, a startup selected to streamline Salesforce usage for Orange's B2B teams. Initially, Donna was considered slightly out of scope for the specific quote-submission challenge Orange had framed. However, because they kept an open mind and brought Donna to the panel, the internal sales team fell totally in love with the app's end-to-end capabilities, like debriefing before meetings and automatically submitting quotes based on session recordings. The internal team eagerly adapted their original scope to embrace the better solution.

The Bottom Line: Innovate or Get Left Behind

Pierluigi leaves corporate innovators with a stark reminder: actively working on disruptive technology is no longer a choice, it is mandatory.

"If you work in a big corporate and you wanna keep the leadership position... keep being innovative and keep being bold is simply needed. There are so many companies which refuse to invest actively on innovative trends, and as a consequence of that, in just a couple of years, they lose their leadership position. It can be Nokia with the decision of not investing on touchscreen. It can be Intel with the decision of not invest actively in ultraviolet lithography. It's very simple, to think that something is just a niche market, and then later on realizing that this is simply the future."

Ready to explore how your organization can connect the dots and find the right startup partners? Catch the full 3-part conversation on this page, and don't forget to subscribe to Novable Voice for more episodes on how innovation scales inside corporations!