Henry Chesbrough Launches European Forum for Open Innovation
Open innovation guru Prof Henry Chesbrough has launched a European industrial forum to discuss, debate and perfect the technique, in collaboration with the Science|Business Innovation Board.
The European Innovation Forum (EIF) is an invitation-only community where members will meet twice a year to discuss in a safe environment what’s working and not working with open innovation, and any lessons that members have learned.
The forum will also address OI challenges that are particular to Europe. Although in some European counties, such as the UK and Sweden, open innovation is well advanced, the uptake in southern and eastern Europe has not been as widespread. And that’s principally because universities and their spin-out companies are not particularly well connected to big industrial players. But there are other reasons too:
“The biggest challenge of open innovation is that you really need to change the way you organise and operate the company,” said Chesbrough. “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 or across different units of the company.”
You can read more of what Chesbrough has to say about the new forum at this short Q&A session posted on the Science|Business website.
The first meeting of the forum will be held in June at ESADE, a leading Spanish business school in Barcelona.
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