Open Innovation Seminar

Henry Chesbrough

Title Talk: Welcome Seminar with Professor Henry Chesbrough
Date & Time: February 2, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Henry Chesbrough is a professor at the Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, and faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation. An internationally acclaimed author, Dr. Chesbrough’s Open Innovation concept was first introduced in his award-winning book, “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology” (2003). When he coined the term Open Innovation, he defined an approach that companies around the globe now use to innovate. Today, Chesbrough works directly with companies through Garwood’s programs to apply the principles of Open Innovation, and he continues to refine our understanding through his research and books.

Michela Beretta

Title Talk: Loved and Rejected: How Supporters React to a Firm’s Rejections of Popular Ideas
Date & Time: February 9, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Michela Beretta is an Associate Professor in Innovation Management at the Department of Management, Aarhus University. Her research focuses on innovation processes in digital and open innovation contexts, with particular emphasis on digital transformation, idea evaluation, crowdsourcing, and creativity. She studies how governance mechanisms, feedback systems, and digital platform designs influence participation, fairness perceptions, and selection decisions in online innovation communities. Her research has been published in leading journals such as Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, MIT Sloan Management Review, and California Management Review. Her editorial work includes membership of the editorial review board at the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Associate Editor at Creativity and Innovation Management.

Benoit Decreton

Title Talk: Deeply rooted and versatile? Knowledge scouts and external knowledge integration in
multidivisional firms
Date & Time: February 9, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Benoit Decreton is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Entrepeneurship at Nova SBE in Portugal. His research examines how firms innovate and compete globally by transferring knowledge across boundaries—between units, firms, and countries. His work has appeared in leading academic outlets, including the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Global Strategy Journal, California Management Review, and Journal of Management Studies. He is on the Editorial Board of the Global Strategy Journal. Previously, he was a research associate at Ecole Polytechnique and a visiting scholar at INSEAD and Stanford University. He received his PhD from WU Vienna and Master degrees from Copenhagen Business School and from CEMS.

David Teece

Title Talk: Innovation, Capabilities, and “Disruption”: Understanding Dynamic Competition from the

Supply Side

Date & Time: February 16, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

David Teece is a Thomas Tusher Professor at the Institute of Business Innovation, Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley and Distinguished Scholar of Strategy and Innovation at the University of South Florida. Professor Teece has been ranked as the world’s most-cited scholar in the combined field of business and management. He has received nine honorary doctorates and royal honors, authored more than thirty books and over two hundred scholarly papers, and has been cited more than 250,000 times according to Google Scholar. Widely recognized for his contributions to strategic management, he is particularly known for pioneering the dynamic capabilities perspective. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. With over thirty years of experience as an active consultant, Professor Teece has provided economic, business, and financial consulting services to businesses and governments worldwide, working across industries ranging from music recording to semiconductors, automobiles, software, and petroleum. He has testified in federal and state courts, before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, and in several international jurisdictions. He also serves as Executive Director of the Berkeley Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization advancing global knowledge on policy and management. Named to the “A-List of Management Academics 2011,” an honorary group of thirty distinguished U.S. business professors, he was ranked No. 1 worldwide in management in 2020 by London-based Clarivate, named a 2021 “Clarivate Laureate” in economics for innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition based on citation impact, and recognized in 2020 as a “Distinguished Management Thinker” by Thinkers50.

Marcus Tynnhammar

Title Talk: Rapid Experimentation and Strategic Resilience: Building Defense Innovation Capacity 
Date & Time: February 16, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Marcus Tynnhammar is a Director within the Swedish Air Force, where he leads the Air Force Rapid Capability Office and associated innovation initiatives. His work focuses on rapid capability development, defense innovation systems, and the integration of emerging technologies into operational military contexts. His research and leadership combine strategic management, engineering management, and
innovation in a practical sense, with a particular emphasis on experimentation, decentralized innovation, and resilience. He has contributed to the development of structured experimentation environments that connect military units, industry partners, and academic institutions in a triple-helix collaboration model. His work addresses how defense organizations can accelerate innovation cycles while maintaining operational robustness and strategic coherence. He is particularly interested in the governance of complex innovation ecosystems, modular open-source architectures in defense systems, and the long-term implications of technological sovereignty. In addition to his military leadership role, he holds advanced academic qualifications in philosophy, product innovation, and engineering management. His research explores epistemic reliability in high-stakes environments, innovation processes in defense contexts, and the design of organizational systems that resist corruption and power concentration over time.

Todd Brous

Title Talk: The State of Agentic AI
Date & Time: February 23, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Todd Brous is an entrepreneur, consultant, educator, and artist with over 20 years of experience helping startups and Fortune 500 companies innovate through emerging technologies. He specializes in Agentic AI, Generative AI, business leadership, and workforce automation, and has advised and helped build more than 10 startups developing AI-driven products and intelligent systems. He is the founder and host of “HBAP | STARTUPS,” a thriving weekly entrepreneur community of over 350 members, and serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Cal Lutheran University, where he teaches platform building with AI. Todd teaches AI for Creatives: Strategies for Success at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), where he became the first faculty member to teach a full course on Artificial Intelligence and has taught for over two decades. His work explores the intersection of AI, creativity, and leadership, helping students and professionals navigate technological disruption and the future of work. He holds an MFA in Computer Art from SVA, a BS in Geology from Tulane University, and graduated with Distinction from the Harvard Business Analytics Program. He is on permanent leave from a Master’s program in Data Science at Georgia Tech, joking that ChatGPT kept beating him on the homework.

Ana Orelj

Title Talk: Friendship as Strategy: Designing Co-Creation with Communities and Lead Users
Date & Time: March 2, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

I am Ana, a PhD student at the Faculty of Business School of Social Sciences, University of Iceland. My research focuses on the management of innovation and technology, strategy, and distributed innovation, approached from a socio-technical perspective grounded in my background in Organization and HR Management and the humanities. I study co-creation and organizational design for distributed innovation, with particular attention to interactions between firm-hosted communities and companies, as well as intra- and inter-organizational structures. My main empirical focus is the gaming industry, especially sandbox games. I have teaching experience at bachelor’s and master’s levels in management and innovation, including entrepreneurship courses for non-business students. I am an external collaborator with the UNESCO GRO Programme (International Centre for Capacity Development) and a member of the organizing team of the World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC): If you’ve seen any of the community’s or conference’s LinkedIn posts, there’s a good chance I’m behind them.

Ivan Zupic

Title Talk: Mapping the Influence of Teece’s Profiting from Innovation Framework
Date & Time: March 9, 2026 | Time: 11:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Ivan Zupic is researching strategic, organizational and societal implications of AI and digital technologies. He is a co-founder and organizer of the London Text Analysis Conference, a premier academic meeting focused on Generative AI in research, management and education. He is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the School of Creative Management, Goldsmiths University of London. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Organizational Research Methods, Energy Economics, Journal of Business Research, Management Decision and European Management Journal. He received his Ph.D. degree in Management and Organization from the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana. Before entering academia he founded a consulting business and worked as a project manager/software engineer for tech startups.

Sea Matilda Bez

Title Talk: Rethinking corporate–startup engagement in action: Why incumbents involve competitors?
Date & Time: March 16, 2026 | Time: 11:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Dr. Sea Matilda Bez is an Associate Professor at the Montpellier Management Institute (University of Montpellier). Her research explored coopetition strategy, with a PhD on “Strategizing and Managing Coopetition,” followed by a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley working with Henry Chesbrough on “Open-Coopetition.” She also served on the steering committee for the Horizon 2020 project, DiHECO, focusing on digital health platforms. Dr. Bez has helped organize several conferences, including the annual WOIC, and has published in international journals such as Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal or Technovation. Beyond coopetition, her research interests include corporate-startup engagement and patient feedback platforms in healthcare.

Ferhat Demir

Title Talk: Cultivating Outside-out Open Innovation: How a Corporate Accelerator Orchestrates its Ecosystem
Date & Time: March 23, 2026 | Time: 11:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Ferhat Demir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship at the Prague University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on innovation management, artificial intelligence in innovation, and open innovation, with a particular emphasis on corporate–startup collaborations. Dr. Demir earned his MBA from Kennesaw State University in the United States and his Ph.D. in Management and Managerial Economics from the Prague University of Economics. His work has been published in leading journals such as R&D Management and Review of Managerial Science. With more than 20 years of experience in the corporate sector as both a manager and management consultant, Dr. Demir brings a robust background in industrial engineering combined with deep expertise in management. This interdisciplinary foundation enables him to explore the intersections of technology and management, as well as complex, multifaceted phenomena such as AI–human collaboration. Beyond academia, he has published a poetry collection and a popular book on the fundamentals of innovation, and he writes a weekly column for a national newspaper.

Sigvald Harryson

Title Talk: Co-Creation for Sustainable Innovation – Breaking Boundaries with the Unusual Suspects – Experience from BASF, Unilever and Biotronik
Date & Time: March 23, 2026 | Time 11:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Sigvald Harryson worked in R&D digitalization at Tetra Pak across 5 countries before acquiring a Dr. Oec in R&D management at St Gallen University and later a PhD in Knowledge & Innovation Management at Göteborg School of Economics. He then pursued his docent degree at Lund School of Economics and Management in the area of industry-university co-creation. In parallel to his research, Sigvald worked at BCG as Manager and at Arthur D Little and Booz Allen as Partner. His latest academic positions include Associate Professor of Ecopreneurship at Copenhagen Business School and Professor of Disruptive Innovation at HULT in San Fransisco. In 1999, Sigvald established iKNOW-WHO.com to co-create extreme breakthroughs in response to significant challenges in sustainability. He has engaged more than 300 different university teams since then to solve 37 challenges.

John Nicholson

Title Talk: Managing open strategy in public-private sector business model innovation: Closing to open and opening to close as intertemporal dualities
Date & Time: March 30, 2026 | Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

John is Professor of Strategy at the University of Huddersfield. He has a background in industrial sales and marketing and held the position of Associate Editor for Industrial Marketing Management until January 2026, publishing multiple papers in that area and editing two special issues on the role of Economic Geography in Industrial Marketing and also one focussing on Business Ecosystems. His publications over a fifteen year period as a research active academic span areas of Industrial Marketing, Entrepreneurship, International Business, Strategy and Public Sector Management. A unifying theme across these works is that of openness, inclusivity and exclusion. He has often deployed methodological approaches such as critical realism, systems thinking and structuration to explain the constraint of structure on human agency in a number of settings. He has also developed a number of papers grounded in process theorizing. Currently John has completed 18 Doctoral supervisions and has eleven doctoral candidates currently under supervision across multiple areas of business, law and sociology. He is currently engaged in a knowledge transfer arrangement to create business model innovation in social housing.

Lukas Vogelgsang 

Title Talk: Don’t Ask, Do Tell: Legitimacy and Public Secrecy in Online Communities
Date & Time: April 13, 2026 | 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Lukas Vogelgsang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Management at Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität Munich, Germany. His research focuses on collective processes of creativity and innovation, with particular emphasis on networks and temporality. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Science and Research Policy.

Birke Dorothea Otto

Title Talk: Don’t Ask, Do Tell: Legitimacy and Public Secrecy in Online Communities
Date & Time: April 13, 2026 | 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Birke D. Otto is an Associate Professor at the Department for Business Development and Technology, Aarhus University, Denmark. As a cultural sociologist, her research focuses on everyday practices of organizations in relation to creativity and innovation, with a particular focus on the role of secrecy, time and failure. She has published in journals such as Organization Science, Organisation Studies and Research in the Sociology of Organizations and is an editor of the independent open access journal Ephemera: Theory and Politics of Organization.

Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen 

Title Talk: Don’t Ask, Do Tell: Legitimacy and Public Secrecy in Online Communities
Date & Time: April 13, 2026 | 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on developing in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the social dynamics and paradoxes arising from new and collective forms of social, scientific, and technological innovation. Her work has been published in journals, such as Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations, among others.

Thomas Fisker Toldbod

Title Talk:The Asymmetric Impact of Management Controls at the Front End of Open Innovation: A Case Study of Unilever
Date & Time: April 13, 2026 | 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CET
Location: ONLINE

Thomas Toldbod is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Management at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research centers on management controls and managerial accounting, both within and across organizations. He has explored how management controls function internally and in inter-organizational settings – such as through performance management systems and governance structures. His recent work investigates the role of management controls in innovation processes, as well as the evolving role of the finance function in organizations. Thomas will discuss his paper co-authored with Linda Nhu Laursen, a Head of Research at Aalborg University’s Design Lab. Linda’s research centers on design, innovation, and product lifetimes, with a strong focus on how design can contribute to sustainable and socially responsible change. As a research leader, she drives field experiments in industry, emphasizing both industrial applicability and societal relevance. Linda works systematically across research, education, and public discourse, combining academic inquiry with engaged, mission-driven practice. This includes open collaborations with industry, public institutions, and civil society; extensive media engagement and public dissemination; and the development of experimental formats such as Repair Camps and Zero Waste.