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

Marcus Holgersson and Ove Granstrand currently teach a course in innovation economics. Part of the course is a series of games, the “IME Award”, where student teams analyze problems and questions related to innovation economics. The team “Just in Case” has done a great job and won the competition. The winning team has, in competition with 17 other teams, proven excellent analytical skills within economic analysis of innovation. Congratulations to Jakob Dalenbäck, Erik Gedda, Axel Gerebrink, Anton Lindegren, and Justin Lundgren.

Starting from June 2017, Sarah van Santen (MSc Organization Studies) joined the Innovation and Intellectual Property Research Group as a doctoral student at Chalmers University of Technology, department of Technology Management and Economics. Her research will focus on firms’ strategies of innovation and IP management in a variety of contexts, especially in digitalizing industries and with special interest in various forms of open innovation.

Today Marcus Holgersson introduced the UC Berkeley Summer Program for Chalmers students. Over the course of this summer 37 Swedish students will take classes at UC Berkeley, visit some of the most interesting companies in Silicon Valley, and do projects on business development in startups.

Marcus comments: “Two years ago I started working on this program, and today I am really happy to finally see so many excited students here in Berkeley.”