Open Innovation at Oxford University Innovation
31st January 2008
The full potential of Open Innovation is enormous for any organisation. The challenge is how to capture new business ideas to ensure the growth and transformation of your organisation. Two questions emerge immediately – where do you look for ideas and how do you engage with the owners?
Open Innovation at Oxford University Innovation
According to Henry Chesbrough (author of the ground-breaking “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology” in 2003) the traditional closed innovation model of product and market development has new ideas generated within the company silo of corporate R&D, marketing and customer interactions. Open innovation in contrast sees companies prospecting for new ideas from more disparate sources including small firms, research organisations and universities, often in parallel industries.
For Open Innovation at Oxford University Innovation to work, you need to develop or tap into the right prospecting networks and rapidly get up-to-speed with talking to new classes of organisations in unfamiliar industries.
According to Dr David Baghurst, Head of the New Business Group at Oxford University Innovation, proven technology transfer firms are uniquely placed to help with both these issues:
“Oxford University employs thousands of researchers, many of whom are keen to see their research results adopted by industry. Over the last 10 years at Isis, we have actively pursued commercial partners of all sizes, worldwide and in all types of industry. In addition to the formal Oxford University Innovation Society business forum, we can draw on the networks of our 40 staff, 60 spinout companies and 300 licensees. We can also draw on the networks of our researcher colleagues in the University, who by their collaborative and open nature have global address books. Making new connections in new industries is what we do – which makes us an ideal partner for anyone facing the same challenges.”
Some companies face issues in dealing with organisations and other companies of a different size. Isis can address this: “our role is technology transfer” says David Baghurst “ A large part of our success has been translating and communicating between people and organisations with divergent experience and objectives, finding common ground and forging long term partnerships.”
Businesses are increasingly recognising the value of interacting with universities, as providers of new technologies and creativity. Universities are fundamentally different to businesses; they have different objectives, and there are challenges bringing the two together constructively. Again Isis has the expertise to help: “nowhere are translation and communication skills more tested than in interactions between businesses and academia. All our staff have commercial as well as research experience which makes us well placed to mediate when discussions falter or stall.”
For the last three years Oxford University Innovation has been working with public and private sector clients beyond Oxford, helping clients develop their own technology transfer processes using our extensive experience, networks and translation skills. “We have developed a methodology for quickly understanding the business needs of a client, researching and evaluating new business options and streamlining commercial discussions to achieve desired outcomes. We are keen to do more and invite contact from interested parties”, says David Baghurst.
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