On Wednesday, February 13, open innovation experts and practitioners from across the globe gathered in Cambridge for Science2Society’s final event: the Future of Open Innovation Practices Day.
Around 100 people attended this day of workshops and presentations at Robinson College, Cambridge, dedicated to members of the open innovation community in Europe and beyond.
Head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, Dr Tim Minshall, kicked off the morning of keynote presentations with a summary of the evolution of innovation, main internal challenges and common misconceptions.
Senior Advisor to Lilly Research Laboratories (LRL) leadership, Dr Marta Piñeiro-Núñez, flew all the way from Indianapolis, USA, to share her experiences with open innovation in the pharma industry. One of the main themes of her keynote presentation was the importance of trust and alliance management principles for successful open innovation partnerships: “we must focus on relational, not transactional partnerships.
Dr Garry Pairaudeau, of leading global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, also spoke of his success with opening up his non-core research results to facilitate further collaborative research.
Neville Jackson, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at RICARDO thought the event was a great opportunity to understand more about how other sectors understand and execute innovation. He said: “One of the clear messages I picked up was that there seems to be a very broad view of Open Innovation – some seem to think this is all about being open to external ideas and technologies and others (including me) make a broader description which includes being open about developing new business models, new markets and licensing.”
The speakers’ examples complemented the core findings of Science2Society, which were presented by Laszlo Bax of Bax & Company and Aldo Ofenheimer of i2m. Some of these findings include the urgent need to transform University technology transfer offices into value creation and extraction agencies, to accelerate collaboration between academia and the talent. As well, user journey analysis of Uni-Industry-Public sector interaction can provide tangible solutions to overcome current pains.
The final event was another successful building block to build an OI community in the context of the Learning and Implementation Alliance (LIA), and other similar events which will take place after the project ends.
If you’d like to find out more, go to our Science2Society Final Event website.
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