Tin Whiskers

Companies who are the most skittish about participating in an “open innovation” partnership are typically concerned about ownership of IP arising from the partnership.  Ironically, these are the same companies who probably don’t adequately train their R&D personnel to recognize IP right under their noses.  Instruction of this nature can help preserve and grow the [...]

Seems like a new company or organization pops on the radar every day offering another way to publish innovation challenges to the great ether of innovators rumored ready to respond.
For my own purposes, and suspicions that others might benefit, I thought to publish my most recent list here.  Note that some of these are companies, [...]

For purposes of this discussion let’s agree that in general the economy really fell off the cliff in most people’s minds back in September of last year when Dow Jones Industrial Average Index sank from about 11000+/- to about 8000+/-. Of course the Index continued to drop until it fell to 6500 three months ago. [...]

When it comes to promoting OI, it seems that any event no matter how small is blown up in to a great victory. This bias tells us two things, first that the instigator is very committed to showing a success even if it is somewhat manufactured. And second, we still do not have very many [...]

This past week I attended a workshop hosted by Swissnex Boston, an initiative of the Swiss embassy, in which the challenges of building innovation partnerships were discussed. Entitled  “Open Innovation to Innovation Partnerships - A new paradigm in a troubled economy,” it was a successful event (IMHO) mostly because there was an appropriate mix of [...]

Today I’m sitting in my town’s library, which was commissioned by Mark Twain when he lived here in the 1908.  I’m working on an open innovation problem when I notice among the famous Twain quotes that are painted on the walls:  “The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a [...]

In a paper entitled, “Open Innovation: Fact, Fiction, and Future“, yours truly and David Fazzina expanded upon a concept that OI works best when the collaboration partners ACTUALLY collaborate; sharing the mission of the company looking for innovation so that innovators could derive disruptive technology through the effort, rather than incremental improvements that have minimal [...]

Perhaps as a consequence of the Bayh-Dole Act academic researchers became more entrepreneurial. As they saw other researchers negotiate with the university to spin off their IP into a start-up company (in which the inventor played a company role), they started to think about how they too could capitalize on their inventions. Today this is [...]

The industry-academic research collaboration provides substantial impetus to the open innovation movement, if not the primary impetus.  The attraction between the two sides is unavoidable—the academic research labs want the financial support and chance for publicity that private industry offers; while private industry needs the infusion of new ideas that is difficult to foster in [...]

This article is a good IBM-sponsored paper of the state of alliances between large pharma companies and research universities.  Given today’s announcement of the Merck/Schering Plough deal, the issue gets more important to universities every day.  The mergers will reduce these large companies’ costs but doesn’t seem to accomplish much from an innovation standpoint.
Pharma seems like the [...]