We collaborated with Marcel Bogers, Associate Professor* at the University of Southern Denmark, to show you an exclusive preview of a lecture on “Managing Open Innovation”, that will air on Danish television later this winter. The lecture is about the “sources for innovation”: how to obtain and make use of external knowledge to commercialize ideas into innovations.
The talk focuses on Open Innovation and the role that companies and users play in the process. He addresses three steps:
- Obtaining
- Integrating
- Commercialization
In obtaining external knowledge for innovation, he firstly shows some examples of companies collaborating. When the talk continues, he moves towards the increasingly important role of consumers in this process, building a bridge between Open Innovation and, for instance, Co-Creation. Marcel Bogers referring to an example of the development of the internet:
“Is it something that came about because some large firm invested a lot in R&D and is now making a lot of money from it? Not really. It was Tim Berners-Lee – who was working at CERN in Geneve – who invented the internet. Did it came from large R&D investments? No, he just needed something to work more effeciently. So in fact, users are very important sources of innovation.”
His elaboration on co-creation as a substantial element of Open Innovation, is (in my opinion) one of the best parts of the lecture. Bogers gives several great examples of products that make up our daily routines and are basicaly invented by ourselves. Bogers: “Sometimes, it doesn’t come from users, but from specialists or small groups of users. And sometimes the experts and users join forces.”
He also refers to a recent study on the impact of consumers in R&D. In the UK alone there are some 3 billion people involved in innovating activities and they spend approximately £5 billion on technological innovations. This is incomparable to the roughly 22.000 people actually working in R&D and is twice as much expenditure as corporate R&D. This leads to the hypothesis that the closed model of innovation isn’t longer valid anymore.
Watch the full lecture:
Do you have any further questions?
Bogers indicated that he will be glad to answer any questions regarding his talk: “If you are interested in
some of the references, let me know, as most of the references to the research upon which I base the talk aren’t visible in the lecture. Most of the material is coming from my own work with various collaborators, and I would be happy to share or discuss this work.” Please feel free to drop your question or remark below.
We will update this post once it has been aired on Danish Television.
*As of Febraury 1, 2012.
