The promise of innovation lures many multinational firms to well-established vectors of novel ideas, like Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv or Shenzhen. That pull to an entrepreneurial ecosystem doesn’t always yield the fruit expected back at the head office. Because setting up a full innovation hub that absorbs new ideas and also creates prototypes so far from headquarters is expensive, some MNCs use “innovation outposts” instead. While these often small offices aren’t designed to create innovations, they pick up the latest signals about cutting-edge trends and send them back home. Innovation outposts connect different worlds, that is the novel entrepreneurial cluster and the established firm.
