WIM VANHAVERBEKE
Prof. Wim Vanhaverbeke is a dedicated open innovation researcher collaborating with different partners in universities and companies around the globe. Professor Vanhaverbeke established the European Innovation Forum with Henry Chesbrough in 2012. He is a frequently asked speaker at leading international conferences and an adviser for several globally operating companies.
Open innovation is widely used in large companies and we know increasingly more about how to manage this process. In contrast, we know virtually nothing about the managers and practitioners who are driving open innovation in large companies. Who are the managers operating in open innovation teams or units? What is their profile? How long do they stay in an open innovation job, and what is their tenure in the company? This report tries to answer these questions based on an investigation of open innovation managers on LinkedIn.
Up to now, several innovation intermediaries have assisted managers to transgress the boundaries from closed to open innovation and facilitated the access to opaque and highly difficult to connect technology markets. Examples such as NineSigma, Innocentive, Innovaro and Yet2.com have been specificaly helpful for technological problems requiring solutions fromom distant and distinct innovation actors. This work aims to address the lack of continuous effort to study the content, structure and governance mechanisms of these intermediaries as well as other less publicized forms such as incubators, innovation agencies, science and technology parks that further complement innovative practices. How do innovation intermediaries help you to implement open innovation?
The benefits of open innovation during the current economic downturn have only recently been analyzed. Henry Chesbrough and Andrew Garman have recently published a Harvard Business Review article (June) on this. Wim Vanhaverbeke, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Hasselt University, Belgium, provides some additional benefits when companies apply open innovation in a downturn, which has not been mentioned in the HBR-article.
