Author: Editor

Posted July 3, 2019  By: Reda El Alami

On June 20^th, 2019 Foresight attended the PDMA webinar Demystifying Open Innovation: Insights from Industry. The agenda consisted of open innovation readiness assessments, roadmaps, and a very informative case study. In order to get the audience on the same page, Dr. Wayne Fisher, Founder of Rockdale Innovation, defined Innovation as the act of “proactively seeking new problems to solve, new ways to solve existing problems, and new ways to implement business building ideas”. In addition he defined Open Innovation as “actively engaging external subject matter experts in the definition of technical problems, identification of potential solutions, and implementation of the best solutions”.

The discussion continued with the Galbraith model, highlighting “what’s important” and “what can go wrong” when installing open innovation in your company, emphasizing the importance of each key element of Organizational Design: Strategy, People, Structure, Rewards, Process; as well as the importance of linking business goals to open innovation projects. As with most product development projects, strong emphasis should be placed on involvement of both the customers and suppliers in all phases of the problem-solving process – problem definition, idea generation, and action planning. We at Foresight always emphasize that it is never too early in your product development process to seek input from your customers, and the same applies to implementation of Open Innovation!

Interested in learning more about Open Innovation? Check out: Open Innovation Essentials for Small and Medium Enterprises. Co-Authored by: Foresight’s Founder, Dr. Phyllis Speser, and VP Business Development, Daniel Satinsky.

Posted May 29, 2018

Foresight Chair of the Board, Dr. Phyllis Speser, was the closing keynote speaker at the 2018 ASTP Annual Conference in Liege. Her talk focused on future challenges for technology transfer. Noting that most TTOs lose money for their institution or lab, and most technologies never make it to market, she questioned the wisdom of focusing on licenses and revenues as key metrics. She noted that the emphasis on money and licenses distracted attention from social impact, such a reducing illness, mitigating climate change, providing clean energy, and so forth. Social impact, she went on, can be measured in terms of United Nations European Union, and national government priorities. Such an emphasis would allow TTOs and their institution to demonstrate their utility to the public and political decision makers in ways money does not. It would also better align TTO activities with the common perceived mission of a university, government lab, research hospital or non profit lab, namely creation and dissemination of knowledge for the good of all. She encourage the attendees to engage in a thought experiment on their portfolios, looking at how they would manage them differently if maximizing positive social impact and the dissemination of knowledge were their primary metrics. How would it affect how they dealt with student entrepreneurs and educational activities within the university or other institutions? She concluded by looking at potential new models for structuring TTOs given such shifts in priorities.