Conference Theme:

Strategic and Public Policies for Open Innovation

Conference Chair: Henry Chesbrough, University of California, Berkeley / ESADE
Academic Program Chair: Marcel Bogers, University of Copenhagen
Industry Program Chair: Solomon Darwin, University of California, Berkeley
Associate Program Chairs: Ann-Kristin Zobel, ETH Zurich & Jonathan Sims, Babson College

We are proud to announce our call for papers for the 4th Annual World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC). Open innovation describes “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries” (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014: 17). It provides insights into how firms can harness inflows and outflows of knowledge to improve their innovation success (Chesbrough, 2003; Enkel et al., 2009; Laursen & Salter, 2006; Zobel, 2017). It has become a popular (and well cited) area of innovation research (Dahlander & Gann, 2010; Huizingh, 2011; West & Bogers, 2014; Randhawa et al., 2016).

The goal of the WOIC is to bring theory and practice closer together. We seek the latest in academic research on open innovation, and combine that in our program with challenges faced by industry executives who manage innovation in their organizations. As a new addition, the 4th WOIC will also engage policy makers to better understand the opportunities and challenges associated with designing effective open innovation policy measures. This is also in line with this year’s conference theme (see more below).

Recently Bogers et al. (2017) stressed the importance to study open innovation at and across different levels of analysis. Open innovation has implications for how innovation activities take place at the individual, organizational, inter-organizational and even higher levels of analysis, such as regions or industries (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014; West et al., 2014).

To help identify and develop the best new theoretical and applied research in open innovation at and across different levels of analysis, we are organizing the 4th Annual WOIC. The first two WOICs were held in Napa Valley in 2014 and in Silicon Valley in 2015, respectively, after which it moved to Barcelona, Spain in 2016. The 4th WOIC will be held in San Francisco, California.

We are seeking both traditional research papers and those with a more managerial or policy orientation. From the accepted submissions, we will be selecting two academic award winners: the Best Student Paper Award and the Best Emerging Scholar Paper Award.

A separate Call for Challenges will be used to identify relevant practical issues faced in managing innovation and attract industry participants, while the conference will also feature particular practitioner awards.