Webinar: How ExxonMobil initiates, manages, and supports open innovation

Event Type: Webinar
Location: Online

Date/Time: 10/23/2025

12 pm - 1 pm

Open Innovation and Contests, Innovation

Open innovation has the potential to unlock vast global resources, but success depends on the ability to integrate these approaches effectively into organizational strategy and culture. In this session, Kyle Basler-Reeder, Global Open Innovation Lead at ExxonMobil, will share how the company has designed and scaled a corporate-wide open innovation program. Participants will learn how ExxonMobil leverages open talent models, external crowdsourcing, and global requests-for-proposal to accelerate problem-solving, broaden access to expertise, and uncover new opportunities.

The session will also highlight key lessons learned from building these processes into a large, technically complex organization, including strategies for overcoming adoption barriers and aligning incentives. Kyle will discuss practical KPIs that ExxonMobil uses to measure impact, and will share examples of how open innovation has contributed to solving some of the company’s most challenging technical and commercial problems.

Kyle Bassler-Reeder

Global Open Innovation Lead

ExxonMobil

Kyle Basler-Reeder leads ExxonMobil’s global Open Innovation program, where he helps teams tackle some of the world’s most complex challenges by leveraging open sourcing, global RFPs, crowdsourcing, and open talent models. Over his ten years at ExxonMobil, he has driven more than 500 innovation opportunities across 200+ teams and built new systems for corporate-wide external collaboration. His earlier work as an exploration geophysicist and AI researcher included pioneering workflows in seismic inversion, applying machine learning to seismic processing, and influencing multi-billion-dollar development projects. A VentureFuel Visionaries finalist, BOLD Awards nominee, and EMTech Award recipient, Kyle also serves on the advisory board for the Berkeley Open Innovation Squad. He holds an M.S. in Geophysics from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a B.S. in Geology from Colorado State University.