NSCPHD1105 Open innovation: An emerging perspective on science-based innovation and entrepreneurship

As a young academic you are increasingly confronted with new challenges and opportunities that go beyond the core of your scientific work to include issues of innovation and entrepreneurship. At some point in your career, most of you will collaborate with innovating businesses, and some of you may commercialize your own ideas. This PhD course aims at increasing your knowledge, skills and competences to be better prepared for this reality by providing you theories, frameworks and tools related to open innovation—an emerging perspective for understanding innovation. The course will focus on linking theory and practice in the context of the basics of open innovation, and the ways in which open innovation can enable scientists to both leverage external sources of knowledge and exploit their scientific research through external relations/activities.

During this course, you will be presented with various aspects of open innovation in science. We will build on the determinants of new technologies, products, and processes at an organizational level, and then expand that general perspective to address how openness can enable innovation and entrepreneurship. Through gaining knowledge about these aspects, you will receive an understanding of the barriers and opportunities that innovating organizations face. On this basis, you will learn how these principles apply to scientific research, which will help you in your future work as scientists, where you will at some point collaborate with firms, work in a firm’s R&D labs, or start your own business. We will also focus on science-based entrepreneurship to help you understand the barriers and opportunities when pursuing an entrepreneurial career. Overall, the course will cover issues such as the sources of innovation, crowd-based practices (crowd-sourcing/crowd-science), value creation and capture (business models), collaboration and partnerships, university-industry relations, and entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploitation.

The course will be conducted in corporation with entrepreneurial academics, business leaders, and experts in the commercializing of research ideas, thereby blending theory with insights from practice. We will run daily workshops in which an applied discussion of theories just learned will be the focus. We also give you the opportunity to get to know supporting organizations, and talk to peers that have pursued entrepreneurial careers. During the course, you will also discuss how you could commercialize your own research, which role open innovation plays in this, what challenges you foresee, and how you would go about dealing with them. In this way you will also have a chance to reflect on knowledge and insights gained by linking it to your personal situation and career plans.