Welcome to the OpenInnovation.net Teaching Section

We are very happy to launch the new teaching section on OpenInnovation.net with this article. Why a teaching section on open innovation you may ask? Quite simply to support people in teaching positions in including open innovation into their courses! Business practice increasingly relies on open, distributed, and collaborative modes innovation of innovation, and business education needs to reflect this trend to ensure the employability of its graduates.

Accordingly, in this section, we will strive to provide information on high-quality teaching material on and around open innovation that you may incorporate into your respective teaching programs. Our goal is not to present to you material that advocates open innovation as a panacea for all business problems. Instead, we want to share with you a diversity of cases that show when open innovation works and when it does not, which opportunities and pitfalls it brings, and which good and poor management decision can be made in the design, implementation, and execution of open innovation processes.

What is special about this section is that we will not aim to directly provide or exhaustively list teaching material for people teaching innovation or strategy. If this is what you are looking for, you might be better off looking at existing offers (see for example http://www.exnovate.org/en/mod_db_cases/) or simply browsing the large case repositories such of Harvard Business School or the European Case Clearing House for contributions on open innovation. Rather, our goal is to explain how and why we select certain material in our own teaching and the experiences we have made using it in the classroom. We want to not only name the material, but would like to share with you what we have learned about applying it. In doing so, we hope that we will be able to support more and less experienced teachers both in developing courses that specifically center on open innovation as well as in enriching their existing syllabi by expanding or revising them to include this vital topic.

We will strive to update this section bi-weekly (as in ‘every two weeks’), focusing on presenting open innovation teaching cases, but also discussing for example course design issues. We will mainly report on material for which we have gathered considerable teaching experience over the years (and which we have often authored ourselves, or know the authors well), but we also invite you to nominate new material which we will be happy to look at. Finally, we strongly encourage you to comment on our articles, and to share with us your own experiences of teaching the material we present.  The more open we are about exchanging our respective experiences and opinions, the more we will be able to improve the teaching we deliver on this essential management topic.

We hope that you will find this section to your liking, and we are looking forward to receiving your comments.