A CHAMPS CBI Cooperation

Professor John Bessant

Professor John Bessant, the Director of Research and Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter, U.K. Professor Bessant is the author of 15 books on innovation and has extensive experience from advising  various national governments, international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank and OECD and many companies such as Lego, NovoNordisk, Mars Toyota, UBS and Morgan Stanley.  John Bessant, University of Exeter

A CHAMPS CBI Cooperation
Discontinuous Innovation on September 27th
Learning to manage open collective innovation on September 28th

Both seminars were about innovation as a survival imperative. In the executive seminar on the 27th, the focus was on discontinuous innovation. Unless we change what we offer the world and the way we create and deliver them, there is a good chance that we may not survive in today’s hostile business environment.  Making a success of innovation depends on active management – innovation leadership.

The trouble is that even if we manage innovation in terms of keeping up – the risk is that this may not be enough. We also need the capacity to do something completely different- discontinuous change - or someone else may. In the seminar, Prof Bessant brought up issues such as how to organize and manage the innovation process and also hoe we could learn and keep up with ‘best practice’ in such a dynamic field; How do we deal with challenges which come beyond the ‘steady state’?. He pointed at ways to pick up early warning signals about discontinuous change.

In the second seminar  - which was a scholar seminar - the focus was on collective and open aspects of innovation with the title Learning how to manage open collective innovation. The seminar started from the assumption that recent years have seen a rapid expansion of ‘open’ approaches to innovation with emphasis shifting from knowledge production to ways of enabling extensive knowledge flows on and out of organizations.  Three converging trends can be seen underpinning extensive experimentation around this: Opening up R&D to a wider range of external players; Opening up innovation to a wide range of internal players (via innovation contexts, etc.); and Opening up innovation to a wider range of user inputs.
.  Significantly this also opens up interesting questions for how we – as a research community – engage with the problem including the potential to make use of such approaches within our research and teaching.

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