In December our researchers Marcus Holgersson and Sarah van Santen attended the World Open Innovation Conference in San Francisco. The conference started with a visit to NASA Ames, and continued with several interesting paper presentations and challenging practitioner sessions, as well as inspiring keynote speeches by David Teece, Arati Prabhakar, Bill Ruh, and many more. The importance of open innovation and innovation management was emphasized in the context of current developments, such as digitalization.
Marcus Holgersson chaired a session on open innovation ecosystems, with presentations by Serena Flammini, Rebecca Karp, and Amadou Lo. Topics discussed included platform strategies, business model innovation, and ecosystem design.
Sarah van Santen presented a paper (co-authored with Marcus Holgersson) on startups’ decision to engage in open innovation. Based on multiple case studies with digital startups, the paper discusses firms’ reasons for ‘opening up’, the process that leads to this decision, and the resulting intellectual property strategies consisting of mutually reinforcing closed and open components.
