Prof. Henry Chesbrough, the leading scholar of ‘open innovation’ management, is launching a European industrial forum to discover, discuss and share the most effective ways to organise business innovation.
The European Innovation Forum is a by-invitation gathering of senior innovation managers at leading companies across industries in Europe. The forum, launched with Prof. Wim Vanhaverbeke, is in collaboration with ESADE Business School in Barcelona, and the Science|Business Innovation Board, a Brussels not-for-profit association. First meeting of the forum is in June, at ESADE in Barcelona.
Open innovation is a term, first coined by Chesbrough in 2003, for one of several approaches to managing innovation. With it, big companies collaborate openly on R&D in networks of universities, small companies, suppliers, government institutes and other parties - both to get ideas out of the company labs and into the marketplace, and to get new ideas into the companies.
Says Chesbrough: “The biggest challenge of open innovation is that you really need to change the way you organise and operate the company. It isn’t just a matter of bringing in more ideas form universities, and everything else stays the same. You have to change the way you work: with your legal people, your suppliers, your customers and distribution partners. Typically, in many large companies, they don’t even share information very well within the company, across different units of the company. “ The European Innovation Forum, he says, will provide a place for companies to discuss the management issues raised by open innovation.
Chesbrough is the world’s leading academic expert on open innovation. He is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, where he heads the Center for Open Innovation, and at ESADE Business School in Barcelona. His key books include Open Innovation in 2003, Open Business Models in 2006, and Open Services Innovation in 2011. He also runs an industrial forum for open innovation in the US. His partner in the new European forum, Vanhaverbeke, is a professor at ESADE and Hasselt University and Vlerick Business School in Belgium.
Chesbrough says Europe has both advantages and disadvantages in trying to make open innovation work here. In many northern European countries - such as the UK, Sweden and Finland, open innovation is well advanced; in southern and eastern Europe, it lags behind in part because the local universities and their spin-out companies aren’t as well connected with big industry. Throughout Europe, he says, obstacles to open innovation include a very expensive patent system - especially onerous for small companies.
ESADE Business School in Barcelona is one of the world’s leading business schools, with a strong practice in innovation-management methods. The Science|Business Innovation Board AISBL is a Belgian not-for-profit association formed to promote a better climate for innovation in Europe; members include ESADE, INSEAD, Imperial College London, Microsoft, BP, SKF and the Science|Business media group. The Board recently published a study of open innovation policy in Europe by Chesbrough and Vanhaverbeke.
For more information, visit the Forum website at: www.sciencebusiness.net/eif. For those interested, the EIF will conduct a webinar on this site on 4 April 2012, at 1600 Central European Time.
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