PITCCH was present at the 9th Annual World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC) 2022, hosted at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The event, which took place on November 15 and 16, 2022, was inaugurated by Henry Chesbrough, and had as this year’s conference theme “The Human Side of Open Innovation”.
Henry Chesbrough is best known as “the father of Open Innovation”. He teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. He is Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University in Rome. He was also the keynote speaker of PITCCH Corporate Challenges Launch event.
The purpose of this year’s theme was to highlight the potential of applying what people know about human resources, cognition, behavior, and other individual-level attributes to open innovation practices.
David Otto, consultant at TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), represented the PITCCH project at this event, in Parallel Best Practice Sessions.
In a presentation that focused on “The European Open Innovation Network for Corporate Challenges in advanced technologies”, David Otto talked about the PITCCH project and the conclusions drawn so far, explaining the models and examples of collaborations and best practices.
As far as best practices are concerned, David Otto mentioned the financial incentives to stimulate the open innovation process and the importance of a challenge manager:
- A challenge manager makes sure that expectations from both sides are clear, challenges on the platform are formulated correctly, and the right audience is targeted. Moreover, a dedicated challenge manager creates a core team at the start of the project by identifying and involving multiple stakeholders. Most important, the challenge manager is an independent person that can be trusted by both parties. This is also one of the USPs of PITCCH;
- Incentives work. We saw significantly more SMEs applying when they could receive a grant for providing a successful solution. Companies always say money is not a driver, but it cut the cost. When BCs have to contribute funds to support the selected SME, they are more committed. Now you see companies involved that really believe open innovation matters. Lastly, during projects (while the incentives might be the driver) it seems that the companies realized the value of each other’s network which further accelerates the open innovation process.
