Open Innovation

Part of the JISC CETIS 2010 conference

Facilitated by: Scott Wilson, Sander Van der Waal and Paul Walk

This strand is taking place across the two days and is being jointly organised by CETIS, UKOLN and OSSWatch. These two sessions will develop ideas for open innovation strategies for taking advantage of open content, open standards, open data and open source and for developing more effective partnerships for implementing them.

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that while these "open" agendas are individually useful, there is more that can be done to align them for greater effect - for example, open source implementations of open standards, open source tools for working with open content, and open source community models for sustaining innovation. There is also a greater awareness that we need to be looking more broadly at how we partner with other sectors and other types of organisations to get better value for our investment in innovation activities.

We will look at case studies, at the current state of the art in open innovation, at the range of activities undertaken in the sector, and develop practical ideas for the short, medium and longer term.



(diagram by Scott Wilson)

Useful links:


 * Transfer Summit
 * Transfer Summit: Open Innovation-Development-Collaboration Blog post by Scott Wilson
 * What is the Open Web? A post by Tantek Çelik
 * Using open innovation to meet ambitious carbon emission targets Blog post by Sander van der Waal
 * Build a better Facebook through open innovation Blog post by Steve Lee
 * Open innovation builds success at LEGO Blog post by Ross Gardler
 * Open innovation tactics and incentives applied to software Blog post by Sander van der Waal
 * Future of Interoperability Standards, February 2010 Position papers from a meeting on open community standards and the formal standards world
 * Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access Paper from 2007 by Brian Kelly, Scott Wilson and Randy Metcalfe

=Action Plan=

1. Identify explicitly the areas where institutions are competing or are able to collaborate.

2. Explore the future role for JISC and in particular the ISCs in coordinating innovation activities even where there is no funding for development projects

3. Investigate whether recent changes in the funding environment could open an opportunity for institutions to collaborate on overseas expansion plans. These are high-risk ventures, and there is currently very little sharing of experiences and sharing of risk and investment in these ventures as they have traditionally been wholly competitive.

4. Apply the lessons of Open Development to OER, in particular we need to use the lessons learned from supporting individuals in OSS in "small" OER, and to investigate the potential for Open Development in shared workflows and processes for "BIG" OER.

5. Promote open development and the business case for enabling future commercial partnerships using open innovation models, both to institutions and to JISC, and to identify and disseminate common open innovation patterns and practices.

6. Develop the business case for retaining and even improving local innovation capacity, which is likely to come under threat in the near future

7. Show how open standards add value to other areas of innovation, for example open data and open content.

8. Explore the role of JISC and in particular the ISCs for enabling external partnerships in moving innovations into production using OI practices

9. Identify how Open Innovation may fit with institutional BCE strategy.

Photos of the flipcharts used throughout this session

Back to JISC CETIS Conference 2010 Programme