How ExxonMobil initiates, manages, and supports open innovation
- Resource Type
- Audio Presentation/Podcast
- Publish Date
- 10/23/2025
- Author
- Innovation Research Interchange
- Topics
- Innovation, Tools and Techniques, Tools for success
- Associated Event
- Webinar: How ExxonMobil initiates, manages, and supports open innovation
Presentation with Kyle Bassler-Reeder
October 2025
R&D organizations rely on a complex mix of tools to accelerate innovation, from foundational AI platforms to design thinking practices and stage-gate methods like patent mining. Yet adoption of new tools is often uneven, with murky ROI and cultural resistance.
Open innovation can unlock vast global expertise—but only when it’s embedded effectively into organizational strategy and culture. How has ExxonMobil achieved this at scale? In this webinar, Kyle Basler-Reeder, Global Open Innovation Lead at ExxonMobil, shares how the company built and manages a corporate-wide open innovation program. Learn how ExxonMobil leverages open talent models, global crowdsourcing, and RFPs to accelerate problem-solving and expand access to new ideas. The session also explores lessons from integrating these processes into a large, technically complex organization—covering strategies for adoption, alignment, and impact measurement through practical KPIs and real-world success stories.
Kyle Basler-Reeder is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and director of the of the Innovation, Design Reasoning, Engineering Education, and Methods (IDREEM) Lab. Her research seeks to understand designers’ cognitive processes with the goal of creating better tools and approaches to enhance engineering innovation and education. She has authored over 200 technical publications, including over fifty journal papers, ten book chapters, and she holds two patents.