On December 12-13, 2019, PNO joined leading industry and academic experts at LUISS University in Rome sponsoring the 6th annual World Open Innovation Conference on “Opening Up for Managing Business and Societal Challenges”.
This year’s conference program included an impressive line-up of keynote speakers and attendees. Francesco Starace, Enel CEO, discussed the concept of Open Innovability developed by Enel applying Open Innovation approaches to tackle Sustainability issues. Starace was also awarded the Global Leadership Award during the WOIC 2019. Prof. Annabelle Gawer (University of Surrey) linked platform and ecosystem to Open Innovation. Prof. Anita McGahan (University of Toronto) inspired the community exploring the most compelling reasons to share knowledge and apply cross-sectoral Open Innovation methodologies to tackle the most severe societal challenges. Finally, Prof. Henry Chesbrough (University of California, Berkeley) gave the world premiere presentation of his latest book “Open Innovation Results”, which discusses how to go beyond innovation generation towards dissemination and absorption of innovation, to address R&D productivity challenges.
Every year, the WOIC brings together experts from the business community, facing real-world challenges, and connects them with the world’s leading academic scholars conducting research on Open Innovation. The aim of the conference is to bridge the gap between theory and practice to foster stronger connections between business practice and academia, accelerating innovation and providing focus for further research.
As leading Open Innovation consultancy, PNO sponsored the event and hosted an industry session on “Overcoming Bottlenecks that Block the Successful Use of Open Innovation within Organizations”. More than 30 people participated to the session and broke down into four groups to discuss the bottlenecks faced by the 4 different stakeholders (Public Organizations – POs, Research Organizations – ROs, large enterprises – LEs, and SMEs) and propose potential solutions. The groups identified many opportunities for PNO to develop supporting OI services for its client portfolio. PNO should play an intermediary role, brokering the elements of collaboration among different stakeholders, building on its OI expertise and experiences to be a platform for the identification, design and implementation of effective collaborative projects. PNO would align interests of different actors in the management of the activities and the tracking of the metrics and KPIs monitoring OI activities success. In so doing, PNO would support ROs in addressing challenges related the disclosure and application of collaborative project result, aligning the divergent expectation and ambitions of partners to effectively exploit research funding towards commercialization. Considering the private sector, PNO’s action would boost LEs’ potential of adopting OI as a long-term strategy rather than an experimentation one, avoiding issues of path dependency from traditional collaborations, expanding the perspective to wider and more diverse opportunities of collaboration, while adequately defining OI clustered budget, responsible people and metrics. SMEs would benefit from PNO support for a better decision making in the allocation of their constrained resources through more focused R&D actions aimed at scaling up their business. Finally, PNO would also play a role to address POs’ challenges related to innovation risk aversion, and data sharing/usage through the identification of innovation priorities deserving dedicated policies, actions, incentives and budget, but also targeted collaborations with relevant stakeholders.
Along with PNO, other industries such as Salesforce, SAP, Siemens, and Ericsson presented their own challenges to the OI community. Find more information here.
The results of PNO’s and other companies’ sessions will be gathered in a UC Berkeley White Paper, that will in-depth analyze the business challenges presented and the solutions proposed by the interdisciplinary and diverse audience attending the activities. Stay tuned to get more details about it and follow the Open Innovation journey of PNO and its network!
