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What to do when a disruptor comes knocking: Lessons from AkzoNobel
How to avoid being disrupted? Partner with your disruptor, argue AkzoNobel Chief Innovation Officer David Williams and IMD Professor of Innovation Strategy Murat Tarakci, as they unpack how to identify collaborative innovation opportunities and ensure they succeed.
Rapid read:
- AkzoNobel reframed disruption as opportunity for forging partnerships: facing a threat to its core antifouling paints business, it partnered with disruptor Philips to co-develop a UV‑C alternative, demonstrating that collaborating with challengers has the potential to unlock new growth rather than erode it.
- Collaborative innovation requires strategy and structure: AkzoNobel systematically maps capability gaps, actively attracts partners through programs like Paint the Future, and applies clear selection criteria to ensure partnerships are strategic and scalable.
- Ecosystems and long-term commitment drive results: Complex innovations demand multi-partner networks and disciplined governance to navigate delays, scale solutions, and sustain value through change.
Disruptive innovation is hailed in business for offering the creative destruction that propels businesses forward. It has become the gospel where small and large companies alike are encouraged to develop disruptive innovations. But what happens when your company is not the disruptor, but the one being disrupted? What do you do when the disruptor asks you to collaborate? When we ask these questions to executives at IMD, the common answers include acquiring the disruptor only to kill it later, outcompeting the disruptor’s innovation, or ignoring it. There is another alternative.
Consider AkzoNobel, a leading global producer of paints and performance coatings, with a portfolio that includes well-known brands such as Dulux, Sikkens, International, and Interpon. In 2014, its antifouling paint, one of its most important and reliable business lines, was about to be disrupted. Fouling, the undesirable, gradual accumulation of microorganisms, algae, and barnacles on submerged surfaces, such as ship hulls, poses a significant challenge for ship owners. As these organisms build up, the accumulation proves costly because this buildup causes hydrodynamic drag. To maintain speed, vessels need to use more engine power, increasing fuel consumption and operating costs. To mitigate this, ships are coated with antifouling paints containing biocides (often copper- or zinc-based compounds designed to prevent the growth of these organisms).
Given AkzoNobel’s sustainability strategy focused on delivering more value with less environmental impact, and a tightening regulatory environment following the 2008 global ban on tributyltin (TBT) and stricter EU controls from 2012, the company was also looking for more sustainable fouling control solutions.
At the time, AkzoNobel’s Chief Innovation Officer David Williams attended a biofouling conference and was presented with an innovative alternative from Philips. The proposed solution to fouling, initially led by Ivo Rutten and Roelant Hietbrink, was to cover ships’ hulls with UV-C LEDs that emit just enough light to stop organisms from attaching in the first place. This novel approach looked promising and could potentially eliminate the need for antifouling paints altogether.
The company could have dismissed the technology as peripheral to its core business and instead focused all its efforts on developing biocide-free antifouling paints. Instead, it chose to partner with the disruptor by opening its in-house marine biology lab to Philips to conduct testing.
To an outsider this seems counterintuitive: why help a disruptor disrupt you?
AkzoNobel had the following options:
- Ignore the opportunity.
- Buy the IP (a costly move for unproven technology).
- License the IP (this would not protect AkzoNobel from competitors unless there was exclusivity).
- Enter into a joint development agreement.
It chose option four, which makes the most sense for early-stage innovations. It aligns with the idea, popularized by the late Clayton Christensen, that if you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will. AkzoNobel’s management team accepted the innovation team’s idea to enter into a joint development contract, agreeing that they would prefer to be part of the potential opportunity, even if it was outside of their core business, than ignore it and risk seeing it adopted by one of the company’s competitors.
Co-opetition (collaborating with competitors) is not uncommon. For example, Microsoft made Office available on Apple computers and Netflix uses Amazon Web Services. There are also many companies that deliberately partner with their competitors in a bid to shut them down or acquire them.
In 2017, the two companies officially joined forces to develop the product, establishing the RunWell consortium. In 2023, Damen Shipyards joined RunWell, bringing required expertise in areas such as vessel integration, complementing AkzoNobel’s surface protection and adhesion expertise, and Philips’ capabilities in UV-C LED applications and electronics. Although it is still not at the point of full commercial application, the project has moved from promising laboratory and small-scale trials toward a proven technology that could realistically be deployed on commercial vessels at scale. The focus now is on building the category and a supply chain for production.
AkzoNobel’s openness to collaborative innovation offers key lessons for executives navigating innovation-led growth.
1 – Admit that you cannot do everything yourself
Innovation increasingly depends on partnerships. As Harvard’s Linda Hill and her co-authors note in a recent Harvard Business Review article, “as complexity and specialization rise and technologies such as AI reshape workflows and product portfolios, no single team or company has all the capabilities, tools, or authority needed to move ideas from prototype to scale.” Even for global enterprises with large research and development teams, if you want to deliver differentiating technologies, you may have to look outside of your own organization.
AkzoNobel has operations in over 150 countries and employs more than 31,500 people globally. Despite this considerable range of diversity and capacity, it recognizes that innovations delivering positive societal outcomes while reducing environmental impact (one of its key strategic drivers) may not always come from within, especially in a world where the pace of change in many areas that impact its business, from advanced materials to sustainable technologies, is accelerating.
To establish where partnerships make sense, organizations should ask the following questions:
- Where does your organization want to be over the medium to long term?
- What market drivers will shape this future, and what customers will want?
- Which technologies and projects can enable your organization to innovate to meet these changes?
- What can your organization viably build in-house and where would it be best to look elsewhere?
2 – Make yourself findable
An openness to partnerships, even if it means being disrupted, is key to AkzoNobel’s strategy – and it should be core for other big companies too. In fact, AkzoNobel has gone beyond seeking out partners by communicating a willingness to collaborate so that prospective partners come knocking. It has done this through the creation of strong inbound innovation channels, including Paint the Future and Innovate with us.
Paint the Future was launched in 2019 to incubate and scale solutions by connecting AkzoNobel with innovators worldwide. What began as a startup challenge has expanded to include customers, suppliers, academia, research institutes, and value chain partners, forming a global network of more than 10,000 participants and 3,000 partner companies.
The basis of the program was to define an industry challenge, invite innovators to propose solutions and, finally, to form cross-functional teams to accelerate development and commercialization. The program led to 29 collaborations and set the stage for building a scalable collaborative innovation ecosystem. While the competitive startup format has run its course, the goal of the program, to create transparency with partners across the value chain and develop more sustainable solutions in paints and coatings, remains a core part of AkzoNobel’s innovation strategy.
The Innovate with us campaign invites innovators to send ideas to AkzoNobel. Resources are set aside across focus areas (e.g., circularity) to review these ideas and to compare them with what is already out there and to establish whether to take it further. This has led to a collaboration with the French drone inspection company Donecle to develop a predictive maintenance service that provides an alternative to conventional inspection methods for airlines, repair centers, and other aerospace stakeholders. The drone-based inspection tool utilizes a specialized three-in-one contact sensor to assess coating performance.
Another example is Swiss startup CoatingAI. Through a two-year development partnership, the two companies developed Flightpath, an AI-based software that optimizes application equipment settings to reduce defects and overspray and improve powder consumption.
The process of selecting the right partner is crucial.
3 – Select the right partner
The process of selecting the right partner is crucial. The company learned many lessons through its Paint the Future program, including an understanding of the gap between the workings of a startup and a corporate company. Startups want to move quickly but corporate mechanisms are not always in sync with the entrepreneurial culture of a startup and can stifle them.
Partnering with suppliers also comes with its challenges. Suppliers generally do not want to work with just one company; they want to share and commercialize their technology with as many clients as possible. However, unless you have an exclusive relationship with the supplier, is it really an advantage?
Based on its learnings, AkzoNobel is moving from ad hoc collaborations to a systematic, disciplined partnership model. This includes the development of a formalized framework for selecting the right partner.
The specifics of this framework builds on three pillars:
- First, what is the value proposition of the innovation to the customer?
- Second, which complementary capabilities are needed to augment this value proposition?
- Third, does a partnership with us add value to our partner too?
The last question underscores the fact that for any partnership to be formed and to last, there should be joint value. A partnership should contribute to the partner’s strategic objectives.
This approach will help highlight potential hurdles to a partnership early on and ensure that these are dealt with or opportunities declined before too much investment is made.
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Explore programsGreat partnerships are often built on personal relationships.
4 – Create processes that sustain partnerships through crises and economic cycles
Great partnerships are often built on personal relationships. However, personal relationships are not sufficient as people move on. Even in the absence of personnel changes, takeovers, economic crises, and leadership changes happen. Because strategy serves as the north star, a partnership is more likely to last if it contributes to the partner’s strategy and if there is a clear understanding of each partner’s expectations. If not, personal vanity projects are often the first to be cut when the business landscape changes.
Forming a partnership does not mean that it has to last forever either. If a partnership no longer adds to the strategy, organizations need to dare to prune their partnerships. This requires a disciplined effort to conduct a strategic assessment of a company’s partnership portfolio regularly.
It is important not to underestimate that people working in R&D in an organization want to see innovation succeed if it brings value to the organization. The RunWell example is a case of a partnership where the commercial application has taken longer to achieve than anticipated. But the company’s belief that if it does succeed it will be a game-changer for the stakeholders and customers, with potential environmental benefits, has driven the company’s commitment to making it work. This commitment has endured despite leadership changes, company restructurings, and unexpected external events like the COVID-19 crisis.
Key takeaways for executives
- Accept that you cannot do it all in-house. Use roadmaps with long horizons to identify capability gaps and establish where partnerships can help accelerate learning and impact
- Be findable and be present. Combine outbound scouting with inbound channels (campaigns + portals) so the right partners come to you
- Use a framework for your partnership choices. Apply explicit criteria (patent portfolio, strategy, approach to sharing technology, culture, development timeline) and decline opportunities that do not meet these criteria
- Institutionalize the relationship. Governance, KPIs, and operating rhythms ensure resilience through leadership churn
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