Last week I attended what might have been one of most profilic gathering of leading OI scholars in the last decade, the OI2012. In the halls of Imperial College 60 attendees from around the world listened to and vividly discussed the papers presented by the 34 plenary authors.
The conference was organized to prepare for a special issue of Research Policy, entitled “Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence".
My dear collegue Joel West has covered the entire event in great detail on his blog so instead of repeating most of what he has already posted I recommend you head over there to read more about this really productive and colloquial event.
Overall, my impressions of this event:
- Finally, no one talks about "why to innovate openly" anymore, but it was all about "how". Especially the topic of governance of open innovation was really strongly there.
- The open innovation community is very much still focused on traditional forms of collaboration and networking. More recent, informal forms of collaboration do not really play a major role, and also the role of user innovators was not really strongly present at the event.
- We finally get much more empirical, large scale data on open innovation -- helping us to explain patterns and broader "promising practices" in the field.
- And on a personal side: The OI community is really a very nice group of scholars, and the four hosts, Henry Chesbrough, Joel West, Ammon Salter, and Wim Vanhaverbeke did a great job in preparing the conference and providing detailed feedback on each paper. A great and very much appreciated service!
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