Tags: Academic | Conference | Culture | Frank Piller | GoldCorp | Idea Competition | ISPIM | Skills

This year's ISPIM conference was held in Vienna from June 22 till June 24. Over 200 papers were presented, with tracks focusing on Open Innovation, Service Innovation, Business Model Innovation, Innovation Policy, or Innovation Networks (to name just a few of them).

Here is a short summary of some presentations:

Tags: Academic | Eric von Hippel | Open Innovation | User Innovation | Workshop

There were 110 registered for the workshop, and I assume that there were around 95 really present at the workshop (at least one of the three days). The participation list was impressive and the most important researchers in the field of user innovation where there: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Joel West (San Jose State), Frank Piller (RWTH Aachen), Nikolaus Franke (WU Vienna), Georg von Krogh (ETH Zürich), Cornelius Herstatt (TUHH) and a lot of other professors, post-docs, and PhD students.

As already Joel West mentioned, Eric von Hippel seems to be the godfather of the user innovation research community. And this is not only Joel's or my opinion - many other participants think the same. In most of the presentations, but also in the pauses between, the presenters closely watched the reaction of Eric and waited for his approval to their work.

Tags: E-Novation | Empirical | Open Innovation | Open Innovation Adoption | Studies | web-based

The term E-Novation was created by the research team of enovationmatters.com, which consists of Ehsan Ehsani, Hazhir Rahmandad, Robert Shelton and also Frank Piller. They recently published some results of their first E-novation study regarding the use of collaborative web-based tools for innovation and product development.

Personally, I am not a fan of this new creation of "E-Novation". I think it refers to much to the late 90s with all its E-Commerce etc. Additionally, I don't think we need another term for web-based innovation tools. But anyway, it highly appreciate their empirical approach. Nowadays, too much theories about innovation in general are build without any empirical evidence. Hence, we are in desperate need of empirical studies which can prove our theories and concepts.

In the end, they collected a worldwide sample of 203 companies (main focus nordic countries and US) with no specific industry focus (also service companies were included).

Tags: Hype | Open Innovation | social media

Dear readers,

i'm sorry for my absence in the last six weeks. I was working on several projects and especially data collection for my open innovation research project kept me busy 24x7. Anyway, today we will take a look on what previously happened in the world of open innovation. Not only in the last six weeks, but from 2006.

As I already wrote in some of my previous posts, the term open innovation is increasingly hyped by social and also classic media. Blogs around the topic of open innovation and crowdsourcing are continuously popping up. My Twitter RSS-feed about open-innovation related tweets already has 650 unread items for the last weeks. And not only bloggers but also academic researchers and practitioners are entering the world of innovation as the provisional programme of the ISPIM conference 2009 shows: The conference topic is "The Future of Innovation" and as we can see from the provisional programme, 21 presentations are solely focussed on "open innovation"!

Based on this overflow of interest I ask you if Open Innovation is the future, or if it is just hyped? Let's take an aggregated look at the rise of popularity from 2006 till May 2009: