Open Innovation Speaker Series – Fall 2012

The Open Innovation Speaker Series is a weekly series intended to provide both academic and managerial perspectives on open innovation and related subjects. The organizers are Henry Chesbrough and Solomon Darwin of the Program in Open Innovation at UC Berkeley. It is open to students, faculty, staff, and the general public. We had the privilege of having many great speakers present during our 2012 Fall Series which included, but were not limited to: VMware, DuPont, Google, and visiting scholars from Zeppelin University, Germany, USC, UC Berkeley, and the University of Oxford.

Highlights included Dr. Ann Majchrzak, Professor of Information and Operations Management at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, who discussed the practical problem of enterprise-wide innovation challenges yielding only incremental ideas. She proposed the solution of a virtual community that would shape and combine other ideas and encourage discussion based on a voting system. Julia Austin, VP of Innovation at VMware, discussed innovation programs that their company offers, such as allowing their employees to shadow other departments to learn and bring back ideas to their home department, academic programs, seminars, innovation challenges, and funding for ideas that would expand, or improve VMware’s product line.

Through this Speaker Series, students, faculty, staff, and the general public obtain real world knowledge and applications of open innovation.

To see speaker presentations below: