About

Open innovation

From the Open Innovation Forum’s perspective open innovation involves all aspects of creating new business opportunities by engaging end-users in co-creative activities. Web 2.0 technologies has caused electronic collaboration to evolve, hence paving the way for companies to invite customers and employees to be involved in the refinement of their offerings. Ideally open innovation will create win-win situations where users get services that are more oriented to their needs and organizations will offer services that are more desired by the market.

Purpose with the forum

The Open Innovation Forum has two main purposes:

1. Gathering and creating new knowledge

The purpose of the center is to function as a knowledge hub where open innovation experts can collaborate on improving theories and practices. The forum focuses both on rallying existing knowledge and practices, and looking into new knowledge creation.

2. Supporting practices

Apart from analyzing and refining existing and future open innovation models the forum will also be a focal point for novice and mediate practitioners to easily find information on open innovation fundamentals, tools, practices and connections so that organizations can get a jump-start into the world of distributed networked innovation practices.

Activities

In order to fulfill its purposes the Open Innovation Forum will be responsible for a number of ongoing activities.

  • Open research. The Open Innovation Forum is coordinating a number of collaborative research activities among selected members of the OIF Group. Much of the research is intended to be published on this website as online articles to stimulate further collaboration in the spirit of open innovation.
  • Think-tanks. The Open Innovation Forum is responsible for recurring get-togethers where leading open innovation experts of the OIF Group meet to discuss the current and upcoming state of open innovation.
  • Educational activities. The Forum Group will provide and present OIF learnings for easy access to newcomers in the area. Formats may be online articles, books, seminars and webcasts.

Founding partners

The Open Innovation Forum was founded in late 2008 by representatives from three organizations:


The National IT User Centre (NITA) at Uppsala University


Center for Information and Communication Research (CIC) at Stockholm School of Economics


CSC Innovation Center at CSC Sweden


Also, the initiation of the forum has been made possible due to financial support from VINNOVA - The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems.