John Riggs, a partner at PWC, hosted a panel discussion with corporate and university promoters of innovation about open innovation.
John Riggs, partner at professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, spoke to corporate and university innovation promoters at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium this morning about the advantages and challenges of creating open innovation.
The panel was made up of Timothy Barnes, director of UCL Enterprise, which acts as the technology transfer for University College London; Dyan Finkhousen, director of open innovation & advanced manufacturing for industrial conglomerate General Electric; Jacqueline LeSage Krause, managing director of strategic corporate ventures for insurance provider MunichRE/Hartford Steam Boiler; and Robert Rosenberg, adjunct associate professor of entrepreneurship for Chicago Booth School of Business.
Finkhousen described how two years ago, GE decided to scale its innovation delivery system and establish a centre of excellence, explaining: “We committed to engage the crowd, both internally and externally. The crowd for us is an extension of the team.”
One of the early challenges, Finkhausen said, had been cultural, in terms of opening up GE’s store of intellectual property. The engagement statements it had were initially very constrained in terms of what was required for a commercial product.
“After retooling to the opportunity statement design, we now have access to more disruptive solutions,” he said.
Open innovation, Krause stated, was about being “open to the outside, and also being open about which tool to use, be it venturing, partnering, M&A, licencing or a university relationship.”
Krause added that, from MunichRe’s experience, the firm had discovered that “you need to give a little to get something back.”
Rosenberg gave an example of how a molecule, after many years of study in the university lab, had not been patented, only for four pharmaceutical companies to then fight with each other to develop drugs based on the research in order to combat anaemia.
“You could argue that open innovation encourage competition that brought drugs to market more quickly.”
Barnes said the concept of sharing was vital, and that universities “were able to construct environments of trust” to enable this.
In the UK, he claimed, the relationship with universities did not start on a transactional or licencing basis, saying: “You start with the problem, and you need to open the funnel as wide as possible, rather than by saying how to do it.”
This article first appeared in our sister publication, Global Corporate Venturing.
