Open Innovation Essentials for Small and Medium Enterprises

Innovate or die is an imperative that is even truer despite its jaded sound. The question is then: how to innovate? Open innovation is the new buzzword for guiding enterprises that wish to compete and thrive. Although open innovation has been around for a while, it has been seen mostly as a tool for large companies. One reason is that most of the academic and professional research has been conducted about or by big organizations. Unlike previous studies, this book will focus explicitly on open innovation as it applies to small and mid-sized companies. Open innovation embraces several different methods under its umbrella, but they all have the same objective: innovate by using what is outside the company. We are going to look at four approaches to open innovation: technology scouting and transfer, IP brokerage and trading, crowdsourcing, and dating and acquisition each approach involves the use of your own or other SMEs for obtaining market ready technology. And each of these is designed to bring outside intellectual assets into the acquirer. These assets typically come in two forms: freely available in the public domain and those that are Intellectual Property, and thus usually come with a price tag. This book surveys and evaluates some of the key tools used in open innovation today. These tools help to structure, enable, guide and collaborate with players outside the company. There are two beliefs that are at the core of our presentation of this material. First, for Open Innovation to be successful it must be affordable. Second, the only reason to implement Open Innovation is if it is an action consistent with a companys strategic goals.

Luca Escoffier, LLM in intellectual property aw, has worked for companies, public institutions, and universities as co-founder, C-level executive, and consultant in three continents. Mr. Escoffier is a TTLF Fellow at Stanford University, invited researcher at Waseda University, and the CEO of Innoventually, a premier Italian Open Innovation platform.

Adriano La Vopa, has an MS in physics and nanotechnologies. After participating in several start-ups as innovation consultant, he became a regulatory affairs manager for LG Electronics. He is working at Philips in different innovation domains, helping teams in adopting Open Innovation and its tools.

Phyllis Speser, JD, also has her PhD in political science, and is a registered technology transfer professional, has helped commercialize thousands of technologies and is co-founder/CEO of Foresight Science & Technology, a consultancy in technology supply chains and intellectual asset management with offices in the USA, England, Chile, and Singapore. She is author of The Art and Science of Technology Transfer and former VP, AUTM.