The velocity, volume and diversity of innovation are higher than they've ever been. High-tech start-up businesses abound - not just in Silicon Valley but as far afield as Israel, Shanghai and Cambridge.
Faced by rising costs and global competition, universities are opening their research departments to the commercial world to help them secure a greater slice of annual funding.
"There's no shortage of new technological ideas being developed by commercial and academic entities globally," argues BT Group chief technology officer Matt Bross. And the possibilities for tapping into this global knowledge base are expanding all the time.
Just as this global resource has been growing, broadband networks and low-cost air travel have made the opportunity to undertake research and development in collaboration with scientific, commercial and academic peers a day-to-day reality.
These more dispersed, dynamic innovation networks are also reflected in the rise of online marketplaces such as www.innocentive.com, where cash rewards are offered for solutions to technology problems posted by corporates and start-ups, as well as universities and other research and development (R&D) labs. And on www.yet2.com, potential solutions seek relevant problems.
Corporate innovation, as a consequence, is opening its doors to the world. An increasing number of organisations are adopting a more pragmatic approach to delivering long-term stakeholder value: one that replaces a "closed" innovation philosophy with one that's popularly referred to as "open innovation".
The intellectual framework for open innovation was established by Harvard and Stanford professor Henry Chesbrough, who suggested that monolithic models of corporate R&D restrict the flow of intellectual capital into and out of an organisation, limiting the opportunities to monetise this "knowledge flow".
While precise definitions vary, "open innovation" effectively means organisations can draw on external resources and best practices to complement the value of own "internal" innovation assets - and achieve greater real returns on their overall investment in innovation.
Open innovation thus acknowledges the emergence of a global innovation marketplace - one where innovation itself is valued as a commodity that can be bought and sold, loaned, licensed, hedged and re-invested.
This "global innovation bazaar" has therefore created new opportunities for organisations to track down and exploit new sources of knowledge in pursuit of their own corporate goals.
Companies in a wide range of industries from pharmaceuticals to aerospace - and BT itself - have been "scouting" for bright ideas for many years through linkages with universities, partners, external R&D laboratories and technology start-ups.
BT has strategic relationships with three of the partners in its university programme - the University of Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University College London (UCL).
Underpinning these relationships are a large number of engagements between researchers in BT and those in its partner universities.
Thirty-three academic institutions and business schools across the world provide BT with access to more than £1billion of research in information communication technology (ICT) and associated fields.
Around ten per cent of BT's research investment now takes place in universities, enabling it to broaden the scope of its research whilst remaining extremely cost effective.
The programme enables BT people to work with some of the world's best academic minds and thought leaders.
Also, as BT's programme includes relationships with business schools, it is able to provide tailored executive education for its management teams and to use all of these collaborations to recruit top quality graduates.
BT's focus has changed from technology innovation to customer-centric service innovation, which means it needs end-to-end innovation from research and development right through to sales and marketing.
This has provided some challenges as university researchers and BT's sales and marketing people have had to learn to speak the same 'language'. Although they all speak English, the use in the two environments can be very different.
This collaboration has enabled BT's university partners to understand the drivers in the company and to see the impact their activities have on BT's internal research, strategy, management process and new services.
One example of this collaborative research is BT's work with the Braunschweig University of Technology and Magdeburg University in developing and trialling an intelligent tool for predicting customer complaints. This allows BT to improve its response levels and lower costs by up to £25million per annum.
Another good example is a project with the University of Essex looking at passive or low-power fibre to the kerb, which should allow BT a substantial reduction in overall power consumption - in line with its green agenda, as well as reducing costs.
In the US, BT has been working in research consortia for quite some time, where a number of industry partners sponsor research. It has started to experiment with this model in the UK.
This has two major benefits: the financial risk for each partner is reduced and therefore areas of research previously perceived as 'too risky' can be examined by the partners, and the interaction for both university and industry players is greatly enhanced.
This can lead to unexpected outcomes and good examples of open innovation in practice. One tangible output has been the creation of a shared vision of what a personalised broadband experience should look like for users in the future. The innovation genie is effectively out of the bottle.