January 2018

Marcus Holgersson has received the honorary prize from the students of the Industrial Engineering and Management Program for his teaching at Chalmers University of Technology and for his work with the UC Berkeley summer program.

The motivation follows in Swedish: “I:arnas hederspris år 2017 går till en lärare som är pedagogisk och kunnig, men även är mån om elevernas lärande. Personen har en väldigt positiv inställning och en glad personlighet som sprider sig till studenterna. Med sin insats och otroliga engagemang under Berkeley-utbytet i somras bidrog denna person med internships till alla studenterna, flera intressanta studiebesök inom olika industrier, sökte ett stipendium som eleverna sedan fick dela på, samt ordnade så att studenterna fick studera på Berkeley-fakulteten istället för att endast nyttja lokalerna. I:arnas hederspris år 2017 går till Marcus Holgersson.”

In December our researchers Marcus Holgersson and Sarah van Santen attended the World Open Innovation Conference in San Francisco. The conference started with a visit to NASA Ames, and continued with several interesting paper presentations and challenging practitioner sessions, as well as inspiring keynote speeches by David Teece, Arati Prabhakar, Bill Ruh, and many more. The importance of open innovation and innovation management was emphasized in the context of current developments, such as digitalization.

Marcus Holgersson chaired a session on open innovation ecosystems, with presentations by Serena Flammini, Rebecca Karp, and Amadou Lo. Topics discussed included platform strategies, business model innovation, and ecosystem design.

Sarah van Santen presented a paper (co-authored with Marcus Holgersson) on startups’ decision to engage in open innovation. Based on multiple case studies with digital startups, the paper discusses firms’ reasons for ‘opening up’, the process that leads to this decision, and the resulting intellectual property strategies consisting of mutually reinforcing closed and open components.

In 2018 many firms and industries will embark on or continue on their digitalization journeys. A consequence is that firms’ resource bases are diversified into digital technologies, not seldom related to some form of information and communication technologies requiring collaboration and interoperability to reach their full potential. Technology and intellectual property (IP) strategy need to account for this change, by shifting some focus from core and enabling technologies and IP to complementary and substitute technologies and IP, and from proprietary control to controlled accessibility. Read our paper on how to adjust technology and IP strategy accordingly. It is available here, press download PDF at the top of the page for a free download of the paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024630117303527