InnovEcoS: Inside CRIF's Innovation Ecosystem

InnovEcoS is CRIF’s Global Open Innovation Hub—our strategic gateway to the global startup ecosystem, enabling new opportunities through exploration, applied research, and hands-on experimentation.

Startups play an active role in our continuous innovation journey: through InnovEcoS, we build partnerships that connect today’s business needs with emerging solutions while anticipating the challenges of tomorrow.

This approach fosters a dynamic, execution-driven environment where co-development and real-world testing generate mutual value: startups gain concrete opportunities to mature their products and accelerate market relevance, while CRIF enhances its ability to anticipate change, adopt impactful technologies, and ultimately deliver stronger, more innovative solutions to its clients.

From Coach to Client to Investor: The CRIF Startup Journey

The collaboration journey often begins with focused coaching, helping startups better understand market dynamics, refine their business model, and strengthen their solution to operate effectively in a corporate environment.

We follow an evolutionary path, which allows us to build strong, impact-driven partnerships: from coach to client to potential investor.

What truly differentiates our approach is our venture client model: CRIF becomes an actual customer of the selected startups, running proofs of concept (POCs) and testing their technologies in real operational contexts. When they prove valuable, we integrate them into our process or product and scale them across the organization. For startups, this significantly accelerates their growth trajectory.

When the partnership matures and there is clear mutual interest, we may also consider targeted investment. This is never our starting point nor our primary goal: it’s something we do only when a genuine, shared path to value creation emerges.

This model fully encapsulates our open innovation philosophy: bringing high-quality external innovation into CRIF in a structured and pragmatic way, generating tangible impact for the

business, our clients, and the startups we partner with.

Startup Selection: CRIF's Structured Approach to Finding the Right Partner

Our selection process always begins with a clear principle: every partnership is driven by a real business need. We analyze the need in depth, clarify technical and strategic criteria, and launch international scouting activities involving our internal InnovEcoS network and external accelerators, such as universities, research centers, innovation hubs, and specialist communities around the world.

Our goal is not to identify the “most interesting” startup but the one most capable of delivering real value, meaning that it meets the following criteria:

• Robust and relevant technologies
• Adequate maturity level
• Alignment with our strategic roadmap
• Security and compliance requirements
• A team with a collaborative, execution-driven mindset

This approach allows us to select startups that combine vision with strong execution capabilities. It is a rigorous process, but essential to building effective and sustainable partnerships.

A Structured Ecosystem of Tools and Methodologies

At InnovEcoS, we use a specific model designed to generate real value and accelerate the integration of external innovation within CRIF.

The first is our Venture Client Program, which represents InnovEcoS’ operational backbone. We start from an actual business need or emerging new market trend or use cases identified via continuous global research, identify the most suitable solution through global scouting, test the technology via POCs in real operational contexts, and when it proves valuable, we integrate it and scale it across the organization.

The second channel is our Call for Solutions, launched in 2025. This is a public, international initiative inviting startups worldwide to propose targeted solutions covering CRIF’s strategic challenges. It significantly broadens our pipeline of opportunities, making our selection process more transparent, inclusive, and globally connected.

We also leverage the expertise developed through acceleration initiatives such as the I-TECH Innovation Program, created in partnership with the G-FACTOR incubator in Italy. This program enables us to support very early-stage startups in evolving from technology to product and from product to market-ready solution.

We do not rely on a single program, but on a structured ecosystem of tools and methodologies that allows us to identify, test, adopt, and scale the most relevant innovations while fostering the growth of the startups we collaborate with.

At CRIF, we believe innovation must be experienced, not merely observed. That’s why we work side by side with startups, embedding their solutions into CRIF and connecting them directly to real business needs. Our mandate is built on 3 complementary pillars:

1. Explore, anticipate, and benchmark: We continuously monitor global innovation ecosystems, emerging technologies, new data‑driven models, and up‑and‑coming players. This provide CRIF with a forward‑looking view of industry shifts.
2. Promote value‑creating collaborations: Through our venture client model, we identify solutions aligned with CRIF’s strategic needs, test them through proofs of concept, and support their adoption and internal scale‑up. This is a hands‑on, impact-driven approach.
3. Engagement and ecosystem enablement: InnovEcoS acts as an ecosystem orchestrator and enabler, linking CRIF with accelerators, international hubs, research centers, and highly specialized startups.

InnovEcoS is the enabler that gives CRIF access to high‑quality global innovation and transforms it into concrete outcomes. For the business, for our clients, and for the company’s growth.