In this episode, we chat with Henry Chesbrough, who coined the term "open innovation." He is the educational director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at Berkeley Haas. He earned his BA in economics from Yale University, an MBA from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in business administration from Berkeley Haas. His research focuses on technology management and innovation strategy. 

Henry talks a little bit about his background from Michigan to Yale, then Harvard to Haas. 

He then explains the term "open innovation," a distributed innovation process that involves flows of knowledge into and out of organizations. He shares the three cycles that can lead open innovation to closed innovation and its risks and limitations.

Episode Quotes:

"Open innovation is an entry point into the domain of corporate innovation. The idea is that not all the smart people work for you. In fact, most smart people work somewhere else. No matter how big you are, no matter how good you are, you can't do it all alone. It's better to be open, to collaborate, to share. It can involve bringing in knowledge from the outside for your innovation activities, the outside in, or allowing things you're not using to go outside for others to use in their innovation. And that would be the inside out."

"Corporate venture capital can be a very effective tool to innovate. You've got to still have a culture inside your own organization because once you find and acquire these things to bring them in, you got to keep the people, and you got to get them to do the new things that extend beyond what they've done before. And without that, you get the form but not the substance."

"Open innovation can be a mechanism to allow you to be more agile, to move more quickly. And you don't have to do it all yourself, or rather, you seek out collaborations with startups, universities, and other sources. As long as you can move relatively fast, you could get an edge in the marketplace."

Show Links:

• Faculty Profile
• LinkedIn
• Open Innovation Results: Going Beyond the Hype and Getting Down to Business

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