Talking Open Innovation with Henry Chesbrough
Henry Chesbrough, the father of open innovation and arguably the platform’s biggest cheerleader often attracts media attention for his knowledge and expertise in the field, and a couple of recent articles/interviews have caught our attention:
The first is a brief article from Business Insider that picks up on comments that the Berkeley Haas School of Business professor made at the recent World Innovation Forum in New York City. He told the assembled masses that in his view companies will struggle if they rely entirely on their own research.
He spoke of a recent past where giant multinationals housed on secure complexes and cut off from the rest of the world generated their ideas only within these spaces. To illustrate just how much times have changed and the impact that open innovation is making he revealed a few stats.
They showed that in 1981 upwards of 70 percent of total R&D spending was paid for by companies employing more than 25,000 workers, and only 5 percent of total R&D spending was paid for by companies smaller than 1,000 employees.
Today, companies bigger than 25,000 employees account for 35 percent of total R&D spending, while companies smaller than 1,000 account for 24 percent of total R&D spending.
Learn from Failures
The second article is an interview with Innovation Management about open innovation’s past, present and future. During the wide ranging discussion Chesbrough talked about the evolution of open innovation over the past 10 years, the distinction between Outside-In and Inside-Out Open Innovation, and the possibility of OI’s unintended side-effects. This last point is something that Chesbrough says needs further investigation by academics.
This would no doubt make informative reading as there is a strong desire for companies to be more open about their open innovation failures to allow the field to develop and mature and for all stakeholders to learn from mistakes.
Reader Comments
Prof. Chesbrough:
KITMéxico.S.C. is the mexican representation of IKI.org, together with the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla are organizing a summer conference, summer institute 2013 on Knowledge Building pedagogy whose creators are Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, they will be present in the conference. From 6 to 9 august, 2013.The approach that we want to give to this conference is the need to train people, learning to innovate from early age to be the innovators of tomorrow in all fields of science, technology and the arts.
We have known a little about open innovation and we believe this conference is ideal for addressing not only the possibilities and challenges of education for innovation but business school interaction and life after college.
I wonder if there is there is any chance of having you present in this academic event, would be a great honor for us, or a message videotaped in the conference.
If exist this possibility, we would like to get an answer to this request with the conditions for doing so. We will continue to learn from the line you noted and will pay off in future generations.
Cordially
Oscar Hernández
Posted by Oscar Hernandez Lopez on February 27, 2013
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