German custom OI coming to town - twice!

On Monday, Frank Piller will be the third speaker at the UC Berkeley Center for Open Innovation speaker series. Frank is well known in the open innovation community for his massive array of PhD students and postdocs at RWTH Aachen, his own substantial OI/UI publication record, and of course for his first love, mass customization.

On the latter front, Frank will be back to hold his biennial mass customization conference (#mcpc2011) here in the Bay Area on November 15-19. The 2011 theme is “Bridging Mass Customization & Open Innovation, and thus his co-chair is the father of open innovation (and COI director) Henry Chesbrough. The CFP has been posted and submissions are due March 30.

I’m sorry that I won’t be able to attend the talk: Mondays are a busy day for me and it’s two hours one way on the bus and BART. However, the COI speakers are being posted to YouTube. Here are the first two speakers:

• Jan. 31: Henry Chesbrough: Open Services Innovation.
• Jan. 24: Joel West: An Overview of Distributed Perspectives on Innovation (slides are also posted to SlideShare)

Frank is always interesting to hear, and last year I got to hear him speak twice. We shared the podium at an OI PDW at the Academy in August where he talked about how a successful OI program was ousted with its champion. In May, we were the one-two opening speakers for an OI workshop in Göttingen.

His is one of three or four talks that I plan to watch — since the video should be available a few days later on YouTube. After the semester gets further along, I might be able to sneak away to see one or two, as long as I’m back in time to teach my 6pm class.