Open Innovation in Copenhagen

Earlier this year, Copenhagen Business School announced that open innovation is one of its six overall research priorities:

Open innovation has increasingly become an attractive way for companies to gain new inspiration from external sources. This area of research addresses the issues of how open companies should be and when, during the process, it pays to be open.

Last month, the open innovation research group hosted a workshop entitled “Organizing for Internal and External Knowledge Creation and Innovation: Looking within or Searching Beyond?.”
I learned about the program today in an e-mail exchange with Keld Laursen, research director for the group (who participated in our 2005 open innovation panel and has published open innovation articles with Ammon Salter from UK data).

Keld said the group includes:

• Keld Laursen
• Jens Frøslev Christensen
• Lars Bo Jeppesen
• Thomas Ronde
• Francesco Rullani
• Toke Reichstein
• Serden Ozcan
• Christoph Hienert

It’s quite an impressive list. Jens was an author in our 2006 book and a 2005 panelist, Christoph was in the 2006 open innovation special issue of R&D Management edited by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh, while both Lars Bo and Francesco are well known in the user innovation and open source research communities.

There are other groups that focus on open innovation in Europe. However, this announcement appears to be evidence of increasing interest in open innovation, at least in Europe. CBS is one of Europe’s most prolific business research universities, and the university with the strongest innovation management focus (including with its DRUID conference.)