A Social Brain Is a Smarter Brain
Bloomberg News reported that open innovation projects always present cognitive challenges, but they also force new, boundary-spanning human interactions and fresh perspective-taking. They require people to reach out to other people, and thus foster social interaction. Two recent studies underscore how deeply social an activity open innovation is. The first, from Newcastle Business School in the UK, looks directly at knowledge exchange between higher education institutions and industry (a typical exchange in open innovation challenges) and concludes that its success depends upon the social processes that facilitate the collaboration. The second, from the University of Lapland in Finland, explores what executives who sponsor open innovation challenges value most about them, and finds that the broader benefits of the multidisciplinary social interaction outweigh the concrete results of getting specific solutions.
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